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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 14, 2016 3:33:00 GMT -5
You're a good guesser, and yeah we are close to some of these things in the story. If you're hooked, keep thinking about them; I promise, the more you bat them around in your head, the louder you're going to laugh when the ahas hit you, and there's a whole chain of them coming up. While working out the story I sometimes wondered whether having more songs made figuring it all out easier, or harder. On the one hand, I don't think there's a chance in hell I could have put it together from just the material of the first three albums. On the other hand, every helping of new songs comes with new false leads, and a lot more text that has to be clearly accounted for. My gut instinct is to say that the tipping point was Heaven is Whenever; I know that my own aha-road came back again and again through a few key songs from that era. Weekenders and Our Whole Lives seem very important in retrospect, and I don't think any song was bigger than Ascension Blues. Ascension Blues is where things pick up after Mary's decision in Records & Tapes. When morning comes, she calls up Charlemagne, and tells him she wants to come up (again, all the way up Lake Street, from Payne Avenue in St. Paul to Uptown in Minneapolis) to meet him: She said she's sick of all the sucking up She said I'm terrified of coming down She wants to meet me back uptown She tells him she's sick of how she's living, of the abandoned sex and the meth addiction; she wants to end it, but she's terrified of coming down. This is something he wants to hear, of course, and it may even be true (the Skins were never more than a substitute for Charlemagne; in R&T we see her contemplating her "morbid mistakes," and it ends with the "silver splinter" of meth "losing ground" [R&T]). So he agrees to meet her somewhere near the place on Hennepin. Diane Lane kept me sane through the spring I was flirting with her films I was trying to say something that seemed kind of interesting Still trying to figure out if she felt anything We already mentioned that Diane Lane's films are the screen adaptations of S.E. Hinton's Outsiders and Rumble Fish. At the time, I forgot to note that, in 2015, Craig responded to the question "Favorite fictional hero in books?" ( link) with three answers: Sal Paradise, Hal Incandenza and Diane Lane played Cherry in The Outsiders, the rich girl who offered to support Johnny (one of the townie Greasers) in court after he accidentally stabbed and killed her boyfriend Bob; the parallel to OftC is evident, and we understand that Charlemagne's talking about princess Mary, whose films are her visions. I believe "through the spring" means through the spring of 2004. (I haven't sat down and done the timeline for this part yet --- when I first started writing these posts I thought I'd catch up these little details along the way, but I've been doing a hell of a lot more writing than thinking since then. And now the story starts to get crazy and the things I haven't nailed down are going to be a pain. But here we are. Please bear with me if I bobble some of these things along the way, once again I'll put together a clean timeline at the end and correct as needed.) This verse covers up a crucial part of the episode that Charlemagne is recounting --- namely, the point at which Mary arrives and explains why she wanted to meet him. From this and the verses that follow, we can infer that she now, for the first time, tells him that he's the object of her visions, and that she's foreseen his crucifixion; then she leads him to a church and says that she wants to show him something. But rather than getting this explanation, we hear Charlemagne pan out to the rest of the spring (it is now March): he tells us that she kept him sane through the insanities which are fast approaching, and that he tried to live up to the role she's cast him in, even while still struggling to understand "how am I supposed to know if you're high, if you won't let me touch you?" [CA]. We walked into the church and people got down on the floor Rolled around and banged the chairs all filled up with the spirit of the Lord I've never felt like that before Mary wants to let him understand what she sees, so she takes him into a Pentecostal "dirty storefront church" [YLHF] to feel the holiness of the people "Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword / Spooked by the spirit of Samuel" [R&T], while she tells him about seeing him as Christ. We said yesterday that there would be more evidence of the two versions of the story, the Crucifixion and the Wedding at Cana, being mixed together; this rolling on the floor is another piece, as is the "sword" (below). I only bow down to the jetset They move so quick we haven't met yet We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven Charlemagne, still thinking of himself as a big-time Savior dealer, is pleased to learn that he's Jesus in this sense too. He's not one of the people falling humbly to the ground around him; he's the kind that only bows down to the jetset, even if that hasn't happened in practice so far. As for them, he'll be friends with them all in heaven, on his ascension as Christ. She said he looked like Jimmy Connors She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein She said we had a pretty huge time He came onto the court and he knelt before the sword There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board I'm pretty sure I went there once before We covered this already: she tells him how she saw him in her vision at prom, how he appeared (and continues to appear) dressed in sweatpants, like a townie, and how she went down on him. He came on to the basketball court in the gym, kneeling to go down on her / kneeling before the knife of the crucifixion --- and then there was an explosion of feedback and electricity in her "speakers" (see "blowing out the speakers on your stereo" [OWL]). What that explosion is, isn't clear yet, but it's clearly related to the scene described in Saddle Shoes: "Eyes shut with his arms out like Christ / The other guy was licking his knife / And then it went white" [SS]. It came to me on television Richard Gere in Days of Heaven Walking through Sam Shepard's mansion We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven She said that he came to her "on television," that is, in her vision, like Richard Gere in Days of Heaven (Richard Gere plays a poor fugitive who, with his girlfriend, schemes to take possession of the mansion of a wealthy landowner, played by Sam Shepard), when she was down at the Ambassador ("Shepard's" mansion). (It seems by the way that the idea for the Shepard character dates at least this far back, prior to his Teeth Dreams appearances. The name may have been suggested by the other Outsiders material in this song.) She said I know you've got a lot of love to give But now you know you can't know where I live I know you're trying to keep it pretty positive And if it makes you feel a little bit better We're gonna all be friends in heaven "But now you know you can't know where I live": finally, along with telling him about the vision of him as Christ, she's told him why he can't touch her. But as a consolation, they're going to be friends in heaven. Charlemagne had used the phrase eagerly, in anticipation of taking his rightful place among the jetset; but coming from Mary, the words are different, and very bitter. It's no consolation to her at all. She wants him, and she's never going to have him. There's a reason why Craig doesn't let on yet why she won't let him touch her, and I won't either; but soon. All the people on my TV We're gonna all be friends in heaven All the actors and the athletes We're gonna all be friends in heaven To be young wild and pretty We're gonna all be friends in heaven In the sweet part of the city We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven The ending of the song is tremendous: Mary is bitter and she is jealous. Under her breath, the truth comes out; it may be true that she's sick of sucking up, but it's mostly Jesse she's thinking of, "young, wild and pretty / In the sweet part of the city" (she's young, she's "wild" [WaW], and she's "beautiful" [HJ]; she's with Charlemagne all the time when Mary's around, as seen in The Sweet Part of the City). And then we get "We're gonna all be friends in heaven" in a third sense; she's saying to Jesse, "you and I'll be friends in heaven, but not now; and that thing you're looking to get, that we're both looking for? You're not going to get it on this earth." The use of the expression "get something" is unusual here, and Craig uses it of Jesse elsewhere, in the 2014 Spin interview ( link): We have a pretty good idea by now about the imagined love that Jesse thinks is going to fill "this void." Mary's determined to make sure that that doesn't happen. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 14, 2016 16:48:59 GMT -5
You're a good guesser, and yeah we are close to some of these things in the story. If you're hooked, keep thinking about them; I promise, the more you bat them around in your head, the louder you're going to laugh when the ahas hit you, and there's a whole chain of them coming up.
I'm beginning to put some of the pieces together. But it's more a feeling of a connection than a full and concluded answer to anything.
Slapped Actress, that's probably a big piece of this puzzle. I've always heard it as a statement by the band, by the Hold Steady. A way of saying that, on their fourth album, they're no longer new kids on the block, doing things who constantly gets compared to history, other bands, other albums. They are now a institution of their own. They make their own movies. But with that, comes troubles as well (Tad's upcoming health issues, Franz' leaving the band in the aftermath of Stay Positive, or before Heaven Is Whenever anyways). When a band is writing and releasing records, doing shows, doing everything a band does, there's always some degree of putting on an act. There are fake slaps to be handed out. But sometimes, those fake fights turn into something more serious. And people playing in a band, touring, drinking, doing drugs, will eventually end up getting hurt, one way or the other. On a songs-about-being-in-a-band note, which is a line going through Stay Positive (the title track, the community described in Constructive Summer, the portrait of other elements of the scene in Joke About Jamaica), it sounds like a statement on the blessings and the curses of doing your own thing for a substantial amount of years, the prize and the cost, the bittersweet feeling of succeeding, but still getting hurt by it. And even when you are the director of your own life and your own story, your still not in control of all the circumstances.
Still: I look greatly forward to you putting into this context. Especially the parts about the fake fight, the slapping and Gina Rowlands.
Still not done with the guessing. I had a three hour walk with my kid sleeping in his trolley today, and I did a fair amount of thinking about the non-story songs (which actually is the only part of this amazing puzzle I feel I'm suited to figure out, at least for now). If I read you right, you have now confirmed seven of the eight non-story songs (now we're keeping those you were unfamiliar with out of it, just for the sake of keeping it simple). These are:
For Boston Touchless Soft In The Center Spectres You Can Make Him Like You Two Handed Handshake Chillout Tent
I've been working my mind around the last one. And, in the same process, trying to guess your favourite song, the one with a big aha in it. I'm gonna leave the last part for now, and stick to my feeling on Constructive Summer being a contender. But for the last clean non-story song, I think I have to go with Citrus. Yes, there's talk about Jesus and Judas in it, but it doesn't seem that specific. And, yes, there's something about "the boys working the corners" there, but then again, nothing we haven't heard before, or seen described in richer detail elsewhere.
I think youv'e mentioned it a couple of times in your posts, but I can't remember it adding anything substantial to the story. And by that I make it my last guess on the non-story list of songs.
With my needs for possible recognition as a good guesser out of the way, I must say that what you write about Heaven Is Whenever being sort of a key to unlock the story is really interesting. Upon arrival it felt pretty disconnected from the rest of the catalog. I never fell deeply in love with Stay Positive, but it seemed very analog to Separation Sunday in mood, colours and (sort of) themes. Heaven Is Whenever was something different. It felt like a deliberate step in a new direction, not only musically (the new sounds on Stay Positive, like the harpsichord or the synth in Stay Positive, felt like something put on on top of everything, while the music on Heaven Is whenever felt fundamentally 'poppier' or brighter, like a change in the core formula) but also lyrically. Hold Steady will always sound like Hold Steady, and Craig Finn will always write like Craig Finn. But HiW felt more universal, not like Boys And Girls being so-specific-that-it-becomes-universal, but more like generic on the top level, on the surface, as well. This is by the way where my shortcomings on the english language is most frustrating. I could easily describe how this felt, and why it felt like it, in norwegian. It's harder in english. But still, you might understand what I mean.
Going back to the songs (or for the most part, the lyrics) during the past couple of weeks, all while reading your posts, have obviously shed some new light on them. And it has made me try to imagine what Craig wanted to do with these songs. How he wanted to broaden the story, but not in a obvious way. The introduction of Jesse was what hit us in the face upon arrival. But it seems like the songs who seemed most universal, general and - in a story sense - superficial, are the ones who carries the deepest meanings, the most hints and the stuff that push the narrative forward. That's pretty sweet.
I mentioned the Lifter Puller song Viceburgh in relation to Our Whole Lives (probably my favourite of that record, and one of my top ten overall, by the way), but I forgot the line who hit me first: "I like the lights and the uptempo tracks". Now, the line is so common that it doesn't have to mean or say anything, but one of the best Lifter Puller songs out there is named I Like The Lights. Just to keep on my ongoing mission of digress with lyrics from another band...:
Six six six am on the weekend, she's creeping out of the east end And you said it was nothing, you just slipped and missed your ride from your girlfriends And hey Jenny, your hair looks crazy messy Did you all nod off with your shoes on, did you fuck and fall asleep on the futon? I can't believe you were crashed out watching some movies Wake up little floozie, Jenny looks a little jonesy She said I don't quite know what happened, woke up with my dress wide open
This is taken from I Like The Lights. You mentioned something earlier about Mary watching the sunrise, and gets reminded of a more innocent scene. When reading that (or something similar to that), I keep thing about Jenny, who obviously is shaken, but also quite stoked about keeping on til six (six six) a.m. in the morning, and with a no-fucks-given attitude don't care that much about waking up with her dress wide open. In Back In Blackbeard we get:
jenny looks on the brightside She said I never saw the sunrise before I met all you guys And now iIve done it on the d-line and bathed in all your basslines And I still ain't died Or have I? Or have I?
There's just something interesting about a) Our Whole Lives borrowing a lot of it's images from Viceburgh, b) Our Whole Lives having a line who says "I like the lights", c) the stuff about Jenny watching movies, staying up till sunrise, and obviously feeling pretty damn good about it. I doubt that there's a deeper hidden meaning here, but there's at least some points where these songs touch each other.
Once again, I don't expect you to comment on any of this, or even bother with Lifter Puller stuff in the middle of an impressive and ongoing investigation of Hold Steady. But I can't help to spread a few thoughts coming up while reading this. Save it for later, or just don't bother. Now, at least, it's here to find.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 14, 2016 19:17:43 GMT -5
Yes yes yes ... the first big aha about this came when I was looking at Ascension Blues, then I remembered Slapped Actress and in that moment knew it was right. I think you're entirely right about your reading of the song, too --- the reason Craig is telling the story in the way he's telling it, is because this way of framing things is pertinent to life as he's seeing it. I don't want to speculate too much about where he's at exactly, but these are things he cares about. There's just a ton of stuff in the songs about acting and anxiety, or about acting becoming real, both for good and ill. In a way it's orthogonal to the story, but it keeps seeping back in, both in ways that are completely essential to the plot (like Slapped Actress) and in ways that are almost incidental, like in the Smidge, where Charlemagne starts by remembering (about Jesse) "we used to pretend that we'd never met," and then shit, that pretense becomes almost real. (The Smidge is another amazing song ...) I'm amazed at that Jenny passage you quoted. To my mind that is so clearly built on the same frame as the Mary in the metal bar story, that I would have used it as evidence if I had known about it. "Craig's got this motif or whatever in his head, about a girl who stays out till dawn and gets high and gets fucked in a kind of dangerous way, and determines that she likes it; we see that clearly with Jenny in I Like The Lights, and we're seeing it again with Mary in Sweet Payne etc." And now that you've shown me this, I think it's clear that "I like the lights" in OWL is foreshadowing of how badly the Narrator's hopes will be dashed. So I think I'm going to ease off this idea of the "not part of the story" classification. Spectres doesn't tell us anything new about the story, but it does shine a lot of light on different things in the story, including, again, acting and anxiety, and roles becoming real. There are definitely references to the characters, too ("bleeding through the bandages" is an obvious one; there are a couple of really good ones). Actually, Teenage Liberation is another song that doesn't tell us anything new about the story, even though all the events referred to in it are straight out of the story, and it sounds like it comes from the Narrator. Maybe I should change the classification to "remote commentary" songs or something like that, and then add Teenage Liberation to the list to make it 9. You've given me a lot to think about here. Anyway, I'm just a couple of days away from the thing I didn't want to spoil, and then I'll put the full list out there. That should make it easier to talk about. In the meantime, seriously, thanks for this, this is awesome. Moving on with the story: after Ascension Blues, the next we see of Charlemagne is in Runner's High. We've already said that Runner's High is told from the POV of Gideon, when he's finally "touched down" in "Houston" after years (nearly eight, July 1996 to March 2004, since he was jumped in at the metal bar) of being out of his mind. The song opens with Charlemagne showing up at his doorstep: He stopped by and I didn't even recognize. He looked shaky and sweaty and puffy and petrified. He said that thing in California is kind of compromised. I was hoping you'd help me. Man, I'm so sick of running. We understand that the "thing in California" is Charlemagne's drug dealing (which he's been doing from behind the bar at the St. Paul restaurant where he works with Jesse). We also understand why Gideon doesn't recognize him at first: after drowning Holly in the spring of 1997, he disappeared, going off to the tire shop. They haven't seen each other since then. But there are several other lines in this song that aren't so clear, lines which suggest that a lot has happened between the time that Mary and Charlemagne met at the Uptown church [ABlues] and now. Four things in particular need to be accounted for: The doctors said that it was all in his head. Then they discovered the blood. This is written in a way to suggest the discovery of a gruesome crime --- except that it's not "detectives," it's "doctors," who can only discover something that's been brought to them. With what we know, we can guess what this must refer to: for some reason, Charlemagne went with Mary to seek medical attention for her condition, and the doctors thought he was nuts --- until they saw the stigmata for themselves. What exactly they sought, and why, is not yet clear. But even with what we know now, there can hardly be another explanation. Tried to duck out but we still got stuck. Like a sneaker in the Mississippi mud. The fact that this comes in the middle of a list of things that Charlemagne is explaining to Gideon makes it clear the "we" part is quoted --- Charlemagne is telling him that he and Mary (1) tried to fly, but (2) got stuck. In (3) the Mississippi mud no less. Whatever else this is, it's clearly an allusion to Stuck Between Stations: There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly But he didn't, so he died John Berryman leapt from the Washington Street bridge and died in the mud on the west bank of the Mississippi river ( wikipedia). The use of "duck" seems to be an intentional pun on the name of the bird, to give a second confirmation that Charlemagne's "running" is "flight." And "stuck" is all over SBS. What's the meaning of "stuck" in Stuck Between Stations, then? As we know, the song opens with the famous Sal Paradise quote, which Craig summarized in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): Craig's careful to add the bit about sex versus souls, and it's hard not to be reminded of what we just said a few posts back, that Charlemagne is stuck between loving Jesse with his body and loving Mary with his soul. Looking at that first verse of SBS again, There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together Sucking off each other at the demonstrations, making sure their makeup's straight Crushing one another with colossal expectations, dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late there's a lot of Magazines here: - "There are nights ... sad time together" reminds us that Jesse "isn't always funny in the night" and that "then you'll probably fight" [Magazines]. - "Sucking off each other / making sure their makeup's straight" is, as we've noted, related to Jesse's "Second dates and lipstick tissues" [Magazines]. - We don't know what the "demonstrations" are but they probably belong in the rhyming list of "celebrations" and "dedications" where Jesse "gets pretty wasted" [Magazines]. - Of all the couples in the story, Jesse and Charlemagne are the ones "crushing one another with colossal expectations," namely the pressures of their respective father/Holly complexes ("daddy issues" / "I hope you'll still let me kiss you" [Magazines]). For the rest, they're co-dependent; "undisciplined" is too vague to be linked to anything in particular, but it obviously fits; and Jesse sleeps late in 40 Bucks. So yes: he's stuck, on the one hand, because of Jesse. He and Mary might otherwise be ready to run, but Charlemagne won't leave and abandon her to the harbor bars. Back to Runner's High for the third obscure passage: Speeding through your story of guns and guts and glory. I'm hoping what you're saying is true. Charlemagne's been asking Gideon for help and telling him a tale of problems; why would Gideon respond to bad news by saying "I'm hoping what you're saying is true"? What could Charlemagne be telling him that is at once both hopeful and difficult to believe? Again, knowing what we know about Mary, we can guess: he's told Gideon about her vision, and about the plan that she's hatched around it. Someone must have said something. This is odd. In none of the Hennepin-era songs up to this point has Charlemagne shown anxiety about anything at all except Jesse; but now he's suddenly on the run. The way this line is worded, we'd be likely to think that Holly, instead of wiping her nose and winking, had finally betrayed him, only we know she isn't in the picture now. We remember that in Criminal Fingers, both the cops and the Skins ("your Uptown friends" [CF]) are looking for Charlemagne, so he really is being hunted. Someone must have said something. But who? It's probably an easy guess, given all the pieces of the picture already out there, but it'll be better to talk about this in a couple of days. First we really want to get the exact plan in front of us. And that's one thing I want to describe as I found it, which means I need to finish up the geography along with it. Hope this doesn't feel dragged out --- I'm going there in as straight a line as I can, now. Thank you for continuing to read along, and if there was something that made you say "yeah" here, and you can put just a little of that back out there for Still Alive Carl, I would be very very grateful.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 15, 2016 14:05:57 GMT -5
Yeah, it's pretty exciting stuff. I left out the last (short) part of I Like The Lights: And I like the lights and I like'em pretty bright And he pulled out a pipe in the taxi And I like the lights and I like'em pretty bright And he took off my tights in the taxi
I Like The Lights is from Half Dead And Dynamite (1997). In 2000, on Lifter Puller's final album (Fiestas & Fiascos), Craig does something unusual. He isn't only paraphrasing himself, he is straight up telling us what he's referencing. This might not be a big deal, but since we're talking about Our Whole Lives, and since you seem a bit above average interested in lyrics, references and connections, I found it worth mentioning. Just look as this: Remember Jenny back from I Like The Lights, she said Well, I like you Dwight, but I don't like the pipe The things that you put in your pipe like your life Now Jenny missed her ride and she's takin off her tights in the back seat of some taxi We went from upstairs at the Nice Nice up to franklin up by 15th And Jenny got dressed as they circled the block They did the secret knock and stuck their hands through the mail slot And one, two, three, four, that's the way that Jenny scoresSince we're moving closer to the crucifixion, another song has been spinning in my mind today. I'm talking about the funnily named song Lifter Puller vs. The End Of The Evening. For a while, I thought I might have mixed up Hold Steady songs about crucifixion(s) with Lifter Puller stuff, but it seems like those morbid stuff (along with familiar 3.2 bars and the combination of see-through and coughing - as I said, this might be interesting to you): And I'm nailed to the nightlife like Christ on the cross Got a terrible cough, my skin is like see-through I've been trying to meet you, dying to reach you It's too late for liquor but we could get some 3-2 We could always get some 3-2 We could always get some 3-2 (...) Before the trash got crucified They loaded up on those curly fries And Pontias Pilate was just Nightclub Dwight in disguiseI'm gonna keep excusing myself, but I probably gonna keep posting these. If you'd like me to quit messing up your thread, just let me know! I totally get you. It's kind of how I've understood you all the time. Every song is referencing others in one way or another. Still, some are more important to push the story alon than others. Glad to be able to add something to it all I've been trying today, but I can't quite wrap my head around it. I think I don't fully get what happened to Holly. Yeah, she drowned - but what about all that born again and resurrection stuff? Quite a few lines that hit me today was (at least to me) kind of suggesting that Holly plays a role in the plan Mary's set up. But I might just be confused about the POV/he/she in some of the songs. B Anyway, if I'm gonna move towards some guessing: Jesse must have said something. If Charlemagne is Jesus in Both Crosses, the Judas he still loves must be a) the one who has betrayed him, and b) someone he still cares about. I can't quite remember who the POV in Citrus is, but I'm guessing it's Charlemagne. And even though the Judas kiss doesn't have to allude kissing (as in = Jesse), it might be fair to assume that a kiss who make Judas seem sincere only could be given by Jesse. But the plan - I can't make a qualified guess. But as I said, there must be something about the blurry lines between the fake and the (making things look) real. And this line that I''ve been puzzled by since I first got into the story: "Charlemagne doesn't feel any pain/ but he's bleeding from the holes in his story". What the fuck does that mean?! Right after, Hard Corey appears. And you have yet to tell us what he is all about. In short: I've discoveret a few loose ends who seems to mean something, but I'm not able to tie them together. Therefore... No. Not at all. I would like this to go on forever. [/quote]
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 0:31:56 GMT -5
Holy shit man, that thing from Lifter Puller vs. The End of The Evening is even tighter than I Like the Lights --- you recognize the cough and Pontius Pilate I'm sure, but there's a lot more there that I haven't even tied up yet. OK, I promise to come back to this, I'll be able to do it pretty soon. Is that Jenny speaking those lines? About your guesses: you're right that we're not done with Holly, but I can't spoil the why and how yet. Charlemagne is the POV character in Citrus, that's right. And your instinct about the blurry lines is heading the right way. Let me dig in and you'll get some satisfaction on this. All right. Obviously, I didn't work through the story from beginning to end; I learned a little bit about characters and events here and there as I made one connection or discovery after another. And the road by which I came to Mary's plan (which I didn't even know was hers, at the time) is something I want to record as it happened. We talked a while back about the key lines from The Weekenders I remember the metal bar. I remember the reservoir. You could say our paths have crossed before. in which Charlemagne recalls Mary foreseeing his beating and crucifixion. That the beating happened at the metal bar is abundantly clear at this point. But the idea that the reservoir was related to the crucifixion was just an inference from symmetry. Under the circumstances, the obvious thing to do was to look for the reservoir. So I went to Minneapolis, MN on Google Maps and typed in "reservoir" in the search bar. Two suggestions came up: Reservoir Boulevard Minneapolis, MN Reservoir Woods Park Dale Street North, Roseville, MN That first one, Reservoir Boulevard, is a street in NE Minneapolis that runs northward to an actual reservoir: But the reservoir itself is located in Columbia Heights, and I couldn't see anything to tie it to the THS story. The second one, Reservoir Woods Park, is a hell of a lot more interesting: Where I come from, a "reservoir" is a natural or artificial lake like the one in the first photo. But that thing in Reservoir Woods Park isn't a lake. That's a water tower. So, apparently, the "reservoir" that Charlemagne's remembering could be a lake; or it could be a water tower. There's more --- Reservoir Woods Park is only about a mile east of the HarMar mall in Roseville, which "HarMar?," a liner notes alternative lyric to "We met him at some suburban St. Paul mall" [CSTLN], identifies as part of the story. And if you follow Larpenteur Avenue a few miles west past the mall to Minneapolis, it turns into Hennepin Avenue (passing just south of the Quarry mall) and crosses the Grain Belt Bridge, as foretold in Party Pit. So yeah, I was pretty psyched at this point. And then I was looking at that aerial view of the park and saw that round thing that looks like a pit in the southwest corner of the picture. And I thought, that's got to be the Party Pit. Sure, the Quarry mall was a few miles west, but if there was one quarry there, there could certainly have been others in the area; I imagined Mary in One for the Cutters, parking by one of them, walking through the woods until she came to the clearing, where townies surrounded the pit, partying, with the water tower looming above the trees beyond. It took me a while to figure out that this was almost all wrong. But there was one part that was right: namely, that "reservoir" can mean "water tower." So it didn't matter that I had a picture of Reservoir Woods Park in my head when I was listening to these lines from Ascension Blues: He came onto the court; and he knelt before the sword There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board I'm pretty sure I went there once before I knew these lines were about Mary's vision of Charlemagne's crucifixion; even if I hadn't really noticed "I'm pretty sure I went there once before" [ABlues] versus "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders], the relation of "he knelt before the sword" [ABlues] to "She saw the angel put a sword in his side" [BCrosses] was perfectly clear. But "the soundman fried the board" ...? And then it hit me, with a whole lot of moving pieces at once. Looking at Hostile, Mass., we already made a note that Gideon was Reaching out to try to touch the special effects Along the same lines, in Sweet Payne the Narrator says that "we" (including Charlemagne, as it turns out), visited Gideon in Bay City (the same point in the story we're at now), where We got so high some nights Michigan looked just like a mitten Some nights we got fried Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows Reach into the speaker and try to hold on to the quarter notes Which sounds an awful lot like what we're told about the crucifixion ("sharpest knife") in Navy Sheets: Everybody's reaching for the sharpest knife Legs wide open on the opening night Everybody's bathing in the laser lights Clever kids screwing with some new device And finally there's Constructive Summer: We're gonna lean this ladder Up against the water tower Climb up to the top and drink and talk ... We are our only saviors We're gonna build something this summer And I thought, holy shit: the soundman is Gideon; our clever kids are climbing the water tower to place some kind of special-effects "new device" up there, for a laser show "opening night." To be their own saviors, somehow ... and then the "opening night" stuff made Slapped Actress flash across the picture: fake fights making it look real we make our own movies and I knew that that was it. *The plan is to act out Mary's vision themselves, and to fake Charlemagne's death.* We know the story; One for the Cutters tells us how it went down, in the woods at the Party Pit, among the partying Skins. Mary brought Charlemagne to Gideon because they need his help to pull off a holographic special-effects magic trick (he's a magician, remember) as part of the production. (Google can point you to various DIY projects for making a laser projector with a Pringles can lens tube.) So, muzzle, for once I get to answer your question: Like so many of these goddamn lines, it means just what it says: Charlemagne didn't feel any pain. Because the stabbing was fake. But telling the story of his death afterward ended up having a few more complications attached than he'd anticipated. Which you can now look forward to. :-) Also: bonus points if you can tell me the name of the Biblical figure who, at the head of a small band, defeated a hostile army with nothing but sound effects and visuals. You were right about another thing ... I've got a lot of favorite Hold Steady songs, but Constructive Summer has a kind of special place at the head of the list. There was a month or so there in which I had already understood that Charlemagne's crucifixion was faked, but hadn't yet figured out the stranger stuff that happens along with it. And I had gone into this thing looking for the story of a miracle, so I was a little disappointed thinking that I'd ended up back among the clever kids. But then I remembered that exuberance of climbing to the top to drink and talk, and the reminder that we can all be something bigger. That shit is standalone awesome, regardless of anything else, and it's stuck with me. We are our only saviors. I believe that. All right. More about the plan and the crucifixion and Bay City and all that shit tomorrow. And geography. Thanks for reading, and for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by spencerm on Feb 16, 2016 2:12:27 GMT -5
I'm interested to hear the rest of this but a bit skeptical about the Pringles can interpretation. For one, Craig tells us twice that it's a pipe. Why should we decide that it's something else instead? And two, if you set the dates on a google search to the time-frame necessary to be inspiration for the writing of the first few THS albums, I don't see any results for a pringles can projector. It's entirely possible that people were doing this but it wasn't documented online, although it would be neat to find a contemporaneous source for this.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 9:31:09 GMT -5
Hey spencer, thanks. This is going to be easier to read if I just answer direct without waiting for the next episode, so let me do it that way. There are two answers to the question, the quibble-quibble answer and the real answer. The quibble-quibble answer is a bunch of quibbles. The reason why Mary sent Charlemagne to Gideon for help is because he's a magician; they are going to stage the performance of their lives and need his skills. Gideon is the one who had the idea (we are actually told this in yet another passage, coming later today) for the projector, and for the details of the production generally. He knew how to build the device he wanted to build --- magic is his thing --- and built it with suitable available materials; a Pringles can is perfect for the lens tube so he used that. He wasn't following a step-by-step thing on the internet. I meant that "you, the reader, can google to see that a Pringles-can projector is feasible." It certainly was feasible in 2004, and Craig had spent enough years around stages and rock show effects to know that. But the real answer is that Craig, "always thinking of what I can fit in," doesn't waste space on arbitrary detail. I totally understand that not everyone is going to be on board with that. It's something that you have to entertain seriously as an axiom, see where it leads, and then evaluate the results based on your own sense of probability and dramatic satisfaction. But the pipe gets repeated emphasis for a reason. And Craig's use of "pipe" in a technically accurate but using-the-obvious-interpretation-to-mislead you way is the same thing he does with "shawl" and "bandages" and "Walter" and a million other things, that is a focus of his art. There's still more about the Pringles can to come but, really, that last answer is the main thing. You're still reading, so you're giving me a chance to bring it all together in a totality that either can or can't possibly be a coincidence. I'm happy with that. Edit: just to be sure that the doubt isn't about something even more basic, I mean that he made a literal pipe out of the Pringles can by cutting off the bottom; see the first definition of "pipe" in the American Heritage Dictionary ( link):
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 16, 2016 16:35:05 GMT -5
As far as I understand, Jenny says the things about liking Dwight, but not the pipe. Craig asks us if we remember Jenny, and then he tells us what she said. As you might have guessed, she appears in a lot of Lifter Puller songs, along with NIghtclub Dwight, The Eye Patch Guy (contender for best line Craig has ever written: "She says she's looking for the steady type/ then she disappears with The Eye Patch Guy"), Sally, Sandy and Katharina. I'm not gonna quote any more at this point, mainly because I've allready got you interested, but also because I'm to concerned about getting to the bottom of the story who is unveiled in this thread.
I had anther reeeally long walk with the trolley today, and I tried to figure out just what happens to Holly, and how she - if she does - reappears in our story. I should have made notes, but it's already embarrassing enough to spend my time with my kid thinking about this stuff all the time. Making notes could set off a few alarms.
Anyway: Anyone who has ever listened to Separation Sunday knows (or at least gets the impression) that Holly dies, and later gets born again or brought back to life. Either physically or metaphorical. So far you've only stated that she's dead - Gideon drowns her in the Mississippi river, right? I've been trying to sort out what lines about Holly who could refer to the thing who soon will go down at the Party Pit. I have a distinct feeling that she's a part of the show they're about to set up, but I'm not sure why. Holly's been disappeared "for years, today she finally came back". Is she coming back for this? And what about the line in The Ambassador - "you came back to us/ in South Minneapolis/ you said revenge exists outside of space and time". The rest of the words indicate that Gideon is the guy coming back, but I'm still a bit confused about this. But mostly I've been thinking about the lines in Crucifixion Cruise, about Holly climbing the cross and liking the view. It's pretty easy to assume it's metaphorical in some sense, but still, when we move closer to a real (or fake-real) crucifixion, it's hard to just forget those lines.
It would make sense that the crucifixion stuff about to happen, happens at easter - for reasons to obvious to point out. And it would might make sense that "easter mess" in How A Resurrection Really Feels actually refers to the ceremony where Charlemagne is about to get crucified. If so, this is where and when Holly returns. And when they "wandered out of mass one day", and faded into/got list in "a fog of love and faithless fear", it might refer to what happens after they've made the movie people believe.
I don't know. Lots of loose ends, and no need for you to go through all this. I just feel that I might start to see some connections here, but I'm not quite sure where it leads.
Haha, I do. I guess I had figured out by now what "the holes in his story" meant - that it had to do something with the fake death show. I've just always loved that line, and never really found any real meaning to it. And I think might a song like The Only Thing is about the aftermath.
I had to do a quick google search, and quickly found the stuff about the three hundred trumpets. I should have done it years ago :-)
Really pleased to name this one. And I totally get you. I've found comfort in the same lines a couple of times before, and it strikes something in me as well. And it's a damn good song!
The rest of this stuff, the water tower thing, the slow build up to a magical trick going down at the pit - it's just crazy exciting. I get up each morning (around 5:30, due to a baby and his demands) and the first thing I do is to check up if there's something new to be read here. Great feeling.
Just one last thing, about the "pinned - down at the Party Pit" vs "pinned down, at the Party Pit". I buy your take on it. But before the "pretty sure we kissed" part, Craig stops at "pinned down":
Sailed away on such separate trips And she got pinned down at the party pit Sailed away on such separate trips And she got pinned down... And I'm pretty sure we kissed
That could indicate that "pinned down" is actually a fair reding, in opposite to "pinned... down at the Party Pit".
Just wanted to add that while I remember it.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 23:41:38 GMT -5
Oh man, keep going. I still have a ways to go until the crucifixion itself, so I really don't want to spoil too much, but in fact you are right about a *lot* of your Holly guesses. Keep turning it over ... Yes!!! I'll flesh it out when we get there, but man, that one is unbelievably satisfying, isn't it? The point I was trying to make about this is that I'm pretty sure *Franz* is the one who chose to stop at "pinned down," not Craig --- in all other songs, Craig set the words to music, but in this song only, Franz was the one who set the words to music, chose what to emphasize, to repeat, etc. I'm pretty sure the words Craig put into his hand just had the verses in basic form, and not the bits and pieces that got cut up and fit to the score as it changes later on. At any rate, that's my inference from the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): But I could be wrong about that! I was saying yesterday that, for a while, I thought Reservoir Woods Park might be part of the story, and maybe even the location of the Party Pit. But on closer inspection, I saw that that circular thing in the SW corner of the picture I posted yesterday isn't a pit, it's a memorial of some kind (there's a cemetery there). So if the Party Pit was located in the park, it had to be hidden by trees or something. I scrolled around Google Maps a bit scanning parkland areas for bowl-shaped depressions, but couldn't find anything. Google searches of "quarry" came up with the shopping center from Southtown Girls, but nothing that was actually a pit, let alone near a park. I met a guy from Minnesota and asked him if he knew the Hold Steady, and fuck yeah he knew the Hold Steady! but he'd never heard of any place that the Party Pit might be based on. But it had to be somewhere, and even if I were to doubt that, Craig had clearly said in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link) that it was a real place: One day I was at work, listening to One for the Cutters, and these lines hit me: Out on the parkways after the parties It was always arousing when they'd rev up their engines Mary used to party with the townies, and then get in their big black cars [BCamp] and cruise around on the parkways. Well, that's a pretty particular detail. There aren't too many parkways where I live, anyway, and if that's true of the Twin Cities too, maybe it could help narrow things down. So I went back to Google Maps for Minneapolis and in the Nearby search bar typed in "parkway." A bunch of big red icons for various businesses came up, and then some little red dots for public transit stops and intersections. There wasn't much of a pattern, but there was a little cluster of spots over in the east part of St. Paul. I zoomed in there, and hey, would you look at that: there's a Johnson Parkway there that starts a little bit east of Lowertown, which leads into Wheelock Parkway, and from there to others around the city. Maybe that's something. So I'm looking around the various green areas here in Earth view, but still not seeing any Party Pit bowls, or rocky ex-quarries, or anything that fit what I was looking for. But that Swede Hollow Park looks kind of interesting, and maybe there's something beneath the tree cover. So on a whim I google it. Third link up is a MinnPost article called "Exploring Swede Hollow, once a neighborhood carved out of the wild" ( link), and I click. The article opens up with the following sketch, and I just about shit myself: So yeah, that's pretty much the Party Pit. It's not a pit in a park; it's a park in a pit. And take a look at the map above again. Swede Hollow is the knot that ties Lowertown, Payne Avenue, Railroad Island / the railroad yards, and the banks of the Mississippi river all together in a unit. Now I'm pretty fucking excited. I drill into the map; there are sketchy places to park on the SW end of it (at the southern terminus of Payne Avenue!), so I make like Mary in OftC and switch into Street View there. And what do you know, someone has set up Street View for the path that winds through the park. Nice ...! I start a virtual trek through the park, through the tunnels under 7th Avenue and up along the northern fork of the path. It's kind of surreal, but I'm definitely walking "into the woods" [OftC] here. The only thing that's a little disappointing as I'm clicking my way forward is the water tower in Reservoir Woods Park in the back of my head; I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to connect that to the story, now that I've found the Party Pit and it's so far away. After another minute or so --- like Mary, I'm thinking --- I see the trees opening up; I'm definitely coming to a clearing, a little overgrown, but there are no trees (there are better pictures than on Street View; search for the "SwedeHenge" sculpture garden and look at pictures of that). And I step out into the intersection next to the clearing space ... and what the hell is that blue thing on the left? Water tower! Towering over the clearing! You can see it from the clearing itself, with less vegetation, in my avatar; that's the old Hamm's brewery in the background, and it's the wikipedia article on the brewery ( link) where I later found the picture. Take a good look at the close-up; at least one of the details is important. With this, Hold Steady Twin Cities geography gets a lot simpler. All these locales at the bottom of Lake Street in St. Paul turn out to be aspects of one big sketchy place. For example, we can see now why the metal bar beatdown, which happened in the basement of the metal bar, is described with "they whaled on him till they killed him down in Penetration Park" [BCamp]. Payne Avenue runs along the northern side of the park; "Penetration Park," the Party Pit, is *literally* "behind the Ambassador" [Ambassador]. Stevie Nix and One for the Cutters identify "the camps down by the banks of the river" with the Party Pit (and it appears that illegal shelters and shantytowns are in fact a big part of Swede Hollow's history). Stevie Nix has: She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River / [liner] paths along the banks and One for the Cutters has both an implicit reference to the paths going through the woods, and an explicit one to her secret: Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing ... It was hard to describe so she kept it a secret The girls that she lived with, they knew nothing about it So now we can understand the story that's being told in Banging Camp: I saw her at the party pit She was shaky but still trying to shake it Half naked and three-quarters wasted She was completely alone I saw him at the riverbank He was breaking bread and giving thanks With crosses made of pipes and planks Leaned up against the nitrous tanks The POV character of Banging Camp is the Narrator: he's in the Party Pit because, once again, he's followed Mary, "half naked" as usual ("wearing see-thru / it was standard issue" [SPotC] etc. [Swish, HM, BCamp, NS, Weekenders]) and three-quarters wasted, hoping to keep an eye on her. Mary, he notes, was completely alone; but he saw Gideon, and Holly, on the nearby riverbank. There are more examples but I'm running out of gas here. Collectively, these St. Paul locales are all referred to in terms meant to suggest Hell at the bottom of the Jacob's Ladder of Lake Street. See Going on a Hike: We were hanging at a rock and roll club It was painted just like hell And Smidge, where "The Whole" is obviously a pun on "The Hole," and "the void," all in opposition to Uptown: At first it felt like heaven. Then it felt just like The Whole. ... At first it felt like faith. Then it felt just like the void. ... Let's go. Let's go back uptown. See also the Party "Pit" itself, and the "Wormhole" of Almost Everything, Lowertown (the literal Inferno!) opposite of Uptown, etc. So we've found the scene of the crime. Now we just have to clear up what actually happens there. I know I promised more than this, both in general and about Gideon, but I'm totally burned out tonight and need to keep it short (so to speak). More tomorrow, maybe even more than one post tomorrow if I can hack it. Thank you very much for your patient reading, and please remember Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 17, 2016 14:19:44 GMT -5
I could write a long reply to that post, but I think it's sufficient to say that I loved it. To see the pit on a map and pictures of a freaking water tower is pretty amazing! Great post - and now, more than ever, I'm psyched for the next part. I really just checked in to post a Craig Finn quote I found today. I haven't read it before, but there can hardly be a more fitting time to find it (and post it) than right now. He's apparently talking about Lifter Puller here, but the quote is from the summer of 2003, right before the Lifter Puller reunion gigs. At that time, Hold Steady were playing gigs in New York, they had recorded at least six songs, and just a month or so after those gigs, the news of Hold Steady's debut album was official. So I guess you can read a little bit more than just Lifter Puller into it: "The thing about the lyrics is that they were written for people who were the same types of fans as me. I would obsess over records when I was young. Analyzing every lyric, piece of artwork, etc. When I was really young I thought every record was a concept album, it was just up to me to figure out the concept. So I tried to create lyrics that related to other songs of ours, and that tell a linear story to make it a fun puzzle thing for listeners, something that has rewards for people who listen closely or a ton of times, etc. I think that led to us gaining some particularly obsessive fans."So there you go! You don't only have the blessing to do this from Craig himself - there's also a fair chance that what at first glance look like a crazy (in every sense of the word) project might actually be closer to the truth than what you'd might imagine. ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?action=showall&boardid=41&threadid=15230
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Here goes
Feb 17, 2016 14:57:23 GMT -5
via mobile
Post by spencerm on Feb 17, 2016 14:57:23 GMT -5
Just one last thing, about the "pinned - down at the Party Pit" vs "pinned down, at the Party Pit". I buy your take on it. But before the "pretty sure we kissed" part, Craig stops at "pinned down": Sailed away on such separate trips And she got pinned down at the party pit Sailed away on such separate trips And she got pinned down... And I'm pretty sure we kissedThat could indicate that "pinned down" is actually a fair reding, in opposite to "pinned... down at the Party Pit". Just wanted to add that while I remember it. For what it's worth, here's the urban dictionary entry for pinned: "The feeling you have when you have crossed the "having fun" phase of doing cocaine into the "a new source of natural energy" phase of it. May also be used to describe the feeling obtained from speed, but with speed, the "having fun" phase is skipped." Which makes the high reading of pinned correct (as also backed up by for Boston and Chillout Tent). I'm wondering if, in following the notion that Craig is always trying to add layers, "pinned" is high and "pinned down" is, at least in the last line, a play on words on the common usage of being stuck or trapped (in this case, being pinned down is the result of being pinned or a love of being pinned). I mean, at this point they're sailing off on separate trips with Mary staying in the same town and the narrator heading off to school (right?). Also, thanks for the note on the pipe. I still think the wording is funny ("a pipe" rather than a piece of pipe), but maybe it's an intentional bit of misdirection premised on the notion that most listeners, caught up in thinking about drugs and booze, will assume its a smoking device... And I didnt doubt that someone had possibly made such a projector at the time, more so just curious if there was a source out there to confirm. But maybe it was one of those things that was passed along by word of mouth etc until more recently.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 17, 2016 15:39:55 GMT -5
Yeah, I was a bit to quick about the Party Pit thing. Skepticalfirst is totally right about the Franz/Craig thing. I overlooked that the rest of the part who ends with "pinned down", and only that, has several of the lines "pinned down at the Party Pit". I buy the notion that "down" refers to the Party Pit, not as a part of the expression "pinned down" - the ambiguity probably intended, though.
I'm not familiar with the Pringles/laser issue, but I've always heard "pipe" as "smoking device" in Hold Steady (and Lifter Puller) lyrics. But the specificity of Pringles might have a meaning. If it's a well used tool to do home made laser stuff, I guess it's seems reasonable.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 18, 2016 1:09:20 GMT -5
Wow, thanks, that's a big improvement on my definition. And now that you say it, I think you guys must be right about this: "pinned down" as a play on words with "pinned," is exactly like "stuck around" as a play on words with "stick" (stickpin). I had imagined Craig handing the text over to Franz and being sort of fatalistic about what happened to it after, but I have to agree that an intentional play on words seems a lot more likely. Good call. Muzzle, Pringles is a brand of potato chips or crisps in the US that comes in a can (the chips are regular in shape, and stack neatly in a column). The can is pretty sturdy and can be repurposed for crafts or whatever. Coincidentally --- or maybe this is why the idea seemed natural to me --- I lived in NYC back in the late 90's early 00's, and for a while around 2002 was poaching wifi from a nearby hotel using a Pringles can antenna (I got automatically logged out by their portal every half hour, which was a pain; but the antenna itself worked great). Not the same thing as a projector, let alone a laser projector, which is a pretty tall order, I admit. But special effects and magic tricks are supposed to be Gideon's thing. (Spencer, don't know if you saw the 300 trumpets thing that muzzle was talking about, but "Gideon" is an allusion to Gideon in the Bible, who defeated the army of the Midianites using only visual and sound effects [Judges 7:17-22].) Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy. :-) It's inevitable that I've got some stuff wrong, but there's just zero chance in my mind that things like the Gideon Biblical parallel are coincidental. But that's me, and it's a cool world because people are different. I ran into another interesting thing from Craig yesterday, having to do with your speculation about whether he planned out the story before they cut AKM. A few days ago he did an interview with Sean Cannon on WFPK ( link); near the end he mentions talking to writer Willy Vlautin about his novel Lean on Pete, and being kind of stunned to learn that Vlautin *didn't* have the whole story figured out before he started writing. That says something about Craig's own method, I think. There's a ton of stuff to go over in the story now, let me keep going with Gideon. First, Bay City. Charlemagne went to Gideon's place to get help, and to hide out from the cops and the Skins, who are all suddenly looking for him. In Runner's High, Charlemagne doesn't say who's after him, but in The Ambassador it's specified that the Skins are asking around for him (Charlemagne is the "you" of The Ambassador) while he's staying with his Bay City tire shop friend in Michigan. And in Criminal Fingers we hear from Jesse that both the Skins and the cops have been by the restaurant to look for him. So when Jesse says of the Skins that They said they heard that you've been staying On Columbus between 28th and Lake and of the cops that They said they came to the place you're staying You went out the window and since then noone's seen you we understand that Charlemagne was eventually tracked down "while [he was] still staying there" [Ambassador] in Michigan, that is, on Columbus between 28th and Lake. What's on Columbus between 28th and Lake? Why, bless my soul if it isn't a tire shop: Which is kind of kickass. But what's that thing running east-west through the middle of the block? You can see it better in Google Earth: And here's the view from Street View; on the right is the corner of the tire shop, on the left is the northern half of the block, and between them runs the bridge over a ravine of some kind with a recreation trail running down it. And let's go back to Michigan for a moment. In Sweet Payne, the Narrator says We got so high some nights Michigan looked just like a mitten It turns out that Michigan is commonly said to be shaped like a mitten (see Wikipedia entry: link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan), and is even called the Mitten state. But if you look at the map there's an obvious problem with this: The Lower Peninsula is effectively shaped like a mitten. But across the gap there's the whole Upper Peninsula too. So on the one hand this is a joke to the effect that all these friendly Midwestern folks saying that it looks like a mitten must be majorly high. But it's also drawing our attention to the fact that Michigan has two halves separated by a gulf. And this block of Columbus has two halves separated by a gulf too. That's why it's Michigan. (The tire shop, being situated on the southern edge of the gap, might be Bay City for this reason also; that's where Bay City is situated on the map of Michigan.) There was more that I wanted to get to today but it's been a nutty week and I'm totally falling asleep. I'll pick it up tomorrow. In any case, thanks for reading and for your thoughts for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 19, 2016 1:59:04 GMT -5
A lot of our information about what happened while Charlemagne was staying with Gideon comes from The Ambassador.
The POV character of this song is the Narrator (the "you" is Charlemagne). It's the story of how the Narrator comes to find Charlemagne at the apartment on Columbus (his presence there is mentioned in SPayne). The Narrator doesn't trust Gideon at first, and tries to persuade Charlemagne to join him in an attack on the Skins. But Gideon has a different idea, and wins first Charlemagne and then the Narrator himself over to his way of thinking.
While you were in Michigan She was pretty much living in A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club.
It was called The Ambassador She was pretty much crashing there. The space between the skin and all her blood.
The Narrator starts by telling Charlemagne that, while he was staying with Gideon on Columbus ("in Michigan"), Mary was pretty much living/crashing down at the metal bar (which we now find out is called The Ambassador). She's living the same life there as before, doing meth, fucking, and bleeding from her stigmata, making it "the space between the skin and all her blood".
I doubt that this is actual evidence of Mary's situation in the metal bar going from bad to worse; while it sounds like the Narrator is communicating bad news to Charlemagne, that's more likely just setting the scene for the purposes of the song in the usual "elliptical" way. In Ascension Blues Mary has already told Charlemagne that she's sick of the situation, and that he can't know where she lives, with the clear implication that she's "pretty much living" there before this. But I plan to double-check this all again, to make sure I'm not missing some actual new low here, or a different possible order of events.
Skipping the pan-out "nights/days" verse to stay with the Narrator's story to Charlemagne:
A Bay City tire shop. It's just a temporary stop. A touchdown on a trip that was mostly undefined.
Again, the tire shop is on the same "Michigan" block, on the gap between the north and south parts of the street; it's also "Houston," where Gideon "touched down" after the long lost-his-mind trip.
While you were still staying there. All the halls smelled like burning hair. In the end it made you sick but at first you didn't mind.
The halls of the club smelled like burning hair, from the Skins burning the trimmings after shaving their heads. When the Narrator and the others first went to the metal bar years ago, they didn't mind the smell; now it was sickening.
(Again, skipping the "nights/days" verse)
I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys. That were asking around for you just the other night. There was blood on the bed And the lights in their eyes. If you came around the back We could take them by surprise.
The Narrator goes on: I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys (the Skins), he tells Charlemagne; they were asking around for you just the other night (as also reported in CF). Mary's blood was on the bed, and they had the light of the "silver splinter" [R&T] of meth in their eyes.
And then, an unexpected turn: he proposes to Charlemagne that they go on the attack. "If you came around the back, we could take them by surprise." We've already noted that Charlemagne is himself contemplating "violent red visions" [CatCT, CF] of the end times. The Narrator appears now as a literal ambassador to him, coming to propose that they undertake a "war" [Knuckles, CatCT] against the Skins together. The echo, in "came around the back," of "Taxmen coming around the back in their kevlar vests" [Knuckles] is deliberate; it's violence that the Narrator has in mind.
Your friend from the tire shop. He keeps talking about some rock Like he wants something hard to hit his head on.
You said he's a mystic. Well I know he's not Catholic. He's got a cross all upside down carved in his arm.
The Narrator looks at Gideon with distrust, still mindful of his role in Mary's growing addiction years before [HM, PP]. He hears him talking about "some rock," and thinks he's still the same guy, saying the same things:
- Gideon, being "soft" [SN, MPADJs, etc.] was preoccupied with being "hard" as a gang member [Knuckles].
- in the liner notes for Banging Camp we see that Gideon's "hi, I like to party on the problem blocks" lyric is a late change; the original text was "He says, Not me baby, / I grew up in the city / let me have the creeps the cops and the rock" [BCamp]. Comparison of the elements of this original text to the same collection of elements (city, insects, cops, meth) in "But if small town cops are like swarms of flies and blackened foil is like boils and hail" [CatCT] confirms that Gideon's "rock" can be understood as the Narrator understands it, namely as a reference to meth. (I just realized that "Rock Problems" contains a pun on the same meaning, specifically to Mary's addiction as detailed in that song; and maybe "Rocky Mountain" High [MM, C&N] does too.)
- he's got a upside-down cross tattooed on his arm, mark of the Profane Existence [SN] and Unholy Ghost [A&H] that he's sometimes seen to be.
But the Narrator has deliberately misunderstood Gideon here, and when he recoils from the tattoo, we see what's going on:
In offering violence to the Skins, the Narrator has stepped into the role of Peter, who tried to defend Christ from crucifixion by drawing his sword against the men who came to arrest him [John 18:10]. His fear of the tattoo recalls the fact that Peter himself was later crucified upside-down. And Gideon is talking about "some rock" because he's heard the Narrator's proposal, and is calling him out as Peter (the name literally means "rock"), of whom Jesus said "upon this rock I will build my church" [Matthew 16:18].
We saw earlier that the "think about his security" line in DLME is a reference to the moment when Peter drew his sword (or rather, to Jesus' response) [Matthew 26:53], and there are others. In Hot Soft Light,
The band played screaming for vengeance
is a direct allusion to the Narrator taking on this role. Similarly, in Curves and Nerves, the second video, corresponding to the crucifixion (in the same way that the first video corresponds to the metal bar beatdown) is called "Revenge of The Pervs" [C&N]. And now we can guess that the line from Both Crosses,
Hey Peter You've been pretty sweet since Easter break
refers to Peter, not as the disciple who denied Jesus three times, but as the one who turned to violence to defend him. We don't know how he's been sweet, yet; but "Peter" there is the Narrator.
(Again, skipping the "nights/days" verse, and the repeat of the Skins verse)
When you came back to us In South Minneapolis You said revenge exists outside of space and time.
It's partly the majesty of the music here, of course, but in the whole story I feel this is the one moment when Charlemagne manages to rise above himself. He gets it mixed, plate-welding "God exists outside of space and time" onto "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" [Romans 12:19], but the result still has real grandeur. Violence is rejected; they're going to tackle this another way.
Back behind The Ambassador. Man it feels kind of magical. I guess your friend can really move things with his mind.
It was called The Ambassador There wasn't much diplomatic there. The space between the skin and all the blood.
We know now that "Back behind the Ambassador" refers to the Party Pit, where the fake crucifixion will be staged. We can guess that the "space between the skin and all the blood" in this context refers to the fake stabbing, where there will be blood that doesn't come from Charlemagne's skin. There won't be a lot of talking when it happens (and the Narrator wasn't a particularly diplomatic ambassador in the present instance either).
But the main thing is that Gideon has a magic trick to play, an alternative to violence, that convinced Charlemagne, and then the Narrator, to turn from vengeful thoughts and get back together in a newly Unified Scene ("James King" --- the Creator/musician --- "King James" --- the Savior of the Gospels --- and "James Dean" --- the exile living East of Eden? that last one is tough [SPayne]; "Me and my friends are like / Doublewhiskeycokenoice ... we'll put it back together" [CSummer]).
We get a more detailed account of what Gideon said to the Narrator to change his mind in another song; this was the thing I promised spencer a couple of days ago, but it's late again and it'll be better to start with it tomorrow anyway.
Thanks always for reading, and for taking a moment to remember Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 19, 2016 14:04:10 GMT -5
By all means, I don't think you are, or accusing you of being crazy :-) It's just that this is a pretty massive project, who assumes there's a link between every song and (almost) every line. I buy it, I think you've laid it out in a way that's totally believable. It's just that, in my experience, people tend to write off these kind of things as crazy. If you try to find some connections or narratives in music, you'd might as well listen to records backwards to hear those satanic messages, or look to find the answer to the Kennedy murder in a rock album. The (pretty obscure) Craig Finn quote is sort of a mild vaccination against that.
This brings my to my favourite exercise: Quoting Craig Finn lyrics from outside the Hold Steady universe. This time, we head for his latest solo album and the fittingly titled St. Peter Upside Down. Again, I can't really tell if it connects to anything, but we get a) Mary, b) lobby (close to vestibule), c) a variation of "I need someone to come and pick me up", d) blue light..., e) ...of dawn (right before sunrise). Make of that what you will:
We all gotta sell out somebody sometimes Gotta take care of ourselves right now Meet me in the booth in the back by the bathroom St. Peter's hanging upside down
Can you hear me Mother Mary? I'm unsteady in the lobby Would you send someone to get me?
I'm barely hanging on Like some claymation fawn In the blue light of dawn
Now she's up in her room She's watching Disney cartoons She always cries when they're kissing the prince
They surrounded Simon Peter The soldiers knocked him down They tore the fisherman's ring from his finger And they hung him upside down
Then I guess we can add Arms & Hearts to the list of songs who tells us something about the show about to go down. I'm mainly thinking about
It started ice cream social nice It ended up all white and ecumenical
and
We were kissing in the center while the band played "Ice Cream Castles"
...and in the center there's a hot soft light.
After all, Arms & Hearts contains that "climbed up on that cross" lyric as well.
I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but I have a feeling that quite a few of the mentions of a band playing a certain song has something to do with the finale. Or maybe not. Not sure.
I spent the morning trying to come up with the song with the more detailed account. I didn't find anything who fit better than Look Alive before my duties caught up with me.
But this has also made me think about some lines I've always been curious about, and always had a feeling that carried something more than what shows a first glance. These lines are:
Now we just need something to celebrate (SK) Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the dead end alley/ yeah, he told him what to celebrate (CSTLN)
And when we're talking about hints about what's about to go down, I think Chicago Seemed Tired Last NIght might be relevant. The opening lines struck my mind since it's been replicated elsewhere. And as you've shown us, Craig rarely repeats lines without wanting to tell us something. Could the search of something to celebrate/wanting to party, but still needing other to give you a reason for celebrating, has something to do with The Narrator and Gideon?
Then I went a bit deeper into Chicago. For one, I realised that William Butler Yeats is alluding Mary - all the irish stuff. But who's Nelson Algren supposed to be? Again, not sure.
Paddy, though, is confirmed (where? I must have read this somewhere) to be Patrick Costello from D4. That made me think about wheter the D4 references in other songs mean something. I quoted you on the Doublewhiskeycokenoice thing, so that's at least one of them. And without knowing any of the details of the crucifixion, it doesn't seem unreasonable that "song number four on that first D4/ you want the scars, but you don't want the war/ that's just hardcore/ these kids are clever to the core" (GLS) is a part of the conversation between Gideon and The Narrator. The last reference I remember is the one in Certain Songs - "D4 is for the lovers". If - as I might have insinuated here - D4 references are used to say something about The Narrator in the context of the crucifixion/the conversation with Gideon, then it might serve as an argument from Gideon's side. Like "hey, you are a lover, not a fighter - let's do this my way". All of this are probably a stretch, but then again, if everything is so tightly written as you lay it out, every D4 reference could be stuck in there for a specific reason.
Since I'm allready neck deep in pretty thin speculation, I'd like to add just one more: The entire description of a band converting listeners to fans and believers in Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night, is some kind of metaphor for what's about to happen in the party pit. The band of clever kids are gonna perform a show - and I think both those (fantastic) verses of CSTLN has something to do with it. And their "setlist", what they're performing and in which order, is maybe hidden in She's Got Legs (legs wide open on the opening night?), Ain't To Proud To Beg (no idea), something by Dixie Dreggs (no idea here either) and The Fairytale Of New York (there's at least some fake part here, and MacColl was a redheaded irish girl, so I guess that should count for something). I'm just not able to condense this into a sequence of events - but I'm pretty damn sure there's something here. I leave it to you to roll everything out, but if I'm remotely right, I wanted it to be stated here, haha.
This was quite a lot of thoughts spread pretty thinly out. But all of this has occupied my mind all through the day, and I needed to get it out.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 19, 2016 22:31:28 GMT -5
Oh I didn't think you were calling me crazy, like you I was addressing the likely perception that I might be. And definitely, yes, most of these things, Dylanology, Paul is Dead, etc. are all batshit. The question of how we judge the difference is interesting. But most interesting to me is just to focus on Craig's skills and ambitions as a writer, both of which are pretty damn rare. Your quote is better, but I ran into a similar one in the 2014 Exclaim interview ( link): I'm way past 75 listens for some of these songs, and I'm still hearing new things. In your quote he uses the word "puzzle," which is interesting. It is like a puzzle, of course. But the tools for solving it mainly come down to rigorous separation of perception from reality, and understanding the characters as human beings, both of which feel deeper, somehow, than puzzle-solving; I guess that's a word I wouldn't expect the person who built it all to use. But maybe he's indifferent about that as long as people listen. So that St. Peter Upside Down thing looks like something I'm going to have to check out, ha. I can't tell at all what it's about but just like you say, these are very familiar themes. That's awesome. You were right or very close about basically everything you said about Holly the other day, and you're right here about Arms & Hearts and literally almost everything about CSTLN. I think the GLS line is the Narrator talking about Gideon --- we see Gideon wanting the prison tattoos ("scars"), but not the fights to earn them ("war"), in Knuckles --- but I'm less sure about it being a conversation. Let me wrap this up because it's been a week of crazy late nights and I need to sleep, but I'll try to come back to some of this stuff shortly. And keep thinking about it. I mentioned that the Narrator's call for revenge comes up in Hot Soft Light, but forgot to add that their agreement not to seek it after all is described there also: The band played screaming for vengeance And we agreed, this world is mostly manacled As elsewhere [YGD, OWL, CSTLN, A&H, BCrosses] "the band" here means the Narrator. "Screaming for Vengeance" is a Judas Priest song, and "the world is a manacled place" is a lyric from it; the meaning is that the Narrator wanted to go attack the Skins, but they agreed instead that they would restrain themselves ("manacled"), because, as Charlemagne said, vengeance is God's, who exists outside of space and time ("this world"). Apparently Craig had Charlemagne's funny formulation written down somewhere as far back as the BAGIA timeframe, even though he didn't use it until Teeth Dreams came out. (It would be something to get a look at those notebooks.) Back to the theme of choosing non-violence; we can now take on the longest-running double entendre in the whole canon, a crazy ten-line thing in Barely Breathing. At the surface, the Narrator is talking about his experiences going to shows and meeting Ray Cappo back in high school: Summer 88 was all heat and intensity. I saw the Youth of Today at the 7th Street Entry. There were skins in the pit. And some of them tried to kill me. Same club next summer. Now they're called Shelter. After the show I spoke with the singer. And he tried to hand me a pamphlet about Hare Krishna. I said you've got to be kidding. Who the hell is the blue guy? But then he said something special. Using only his eyes. But if we ignore the dates and recall that the Party Pit, the Ambassador, the banks of the river etc. are just different parts of Hell [BCamp, SN, OftC, etc.], we can see a single continuous subtext under the whole thing. Putting aside "88," the first of the three verses above is about the Narrator's experience at the metal bar. Take a look again at the simplified map of the Party Pit, which puts a perfectly coherent but totally different construction on the "7th Street Entry" to the "pit": Following this reading, the "Youth of Today" are the kids, including Gideon; some of the Skins "tried to kill" the Narrator when they beat him up along with Charlemagne. In the next verse, "same club" means "back down to the Ambassador," to Hell, for the crucifixion. The Narrator was ready for a war, but then he spoke to Gideon (of the former "youth"; now called "Shelter" because he's hiding Charlemagne in his Columbus Ave apartment). We know it's Gideon too because of the special eyes ("psycho eyes" [Swish], "wild eyes" [HSL], "enlightened eyes" [BCrosses]). And Gideon told him about a non-violent alternative. It's easy to accept that "Hare Krishna" means non-violence, especially in the context of Barely Breathing, where non-violence is an explicit moral of the song ("No one wins at violent shows" [BBreathing]). And Shelter really was a Krishnacore band. But that's not all that's going on here; "Who the hell is the blue guy?" isn't just the Narrator's 1989 reaction to seeing a picture of Krishna in the pamphlet. No, he's incredulous, because Gideon is telling him about the magic trick he has planned. Which is to put a transparent screen on the fence around the water tower (take another look at the close-up a few posts back) and use the projector to create the *image* of Charlemagne as the target for the stabbing. This magic trick, dating from the 1500's and popularly known as "Pepper's Ghost" ( wikipedia), usually puts a blue tinge on the projected image; you can see this in the following examples from Google Images (the fourth one is from the 2012 Coachella festival, where the technique was used to bring Tupac "back to life" for a performance). So "the blue guy" is Charlemagne's projected image; it's supposed to appear to be Charlemagne himself, but among themselves the characters make references to it as a "spirit" or "ghost" (part of Gideon's status as the Holy Ghost is due to the fact that he's the one projecting it. When, after the crucifixion, Charlemagne says "I guess he might have been that ghost" [A&H], he's referring to Gideon as the animating force behind his own image). The details about what they do with the image are scattered all over the place, and it'll take at least a few days to get it all. But let's take it a piece at a time. First off, the Narrator objects that the idea is nuts, and it is. A normal, skeptical audience wouldn't likely be taken in by it. But we're told in clear terms that this is not a normal, skeptical audience [OftC]: When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing Where townies would gather and drink until blackout Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out That repeated emphasis on "blackout" / "pass out" is deliberate; when they party in the Pit, the Skins get completely fucked up, and Gideon's counting on this to help "sell" their production. It's not just that they will believe it --- it's that, due to some combination of the drugs, drama, murder, and special effects, they will be terrified by what they see. Mary tells Charlemagne that she's foreseen them falling to the ground at the sight of the spirit [ABlues]: We walked into the church and people got down on the floor Rolled around and banged the chairs all filled up with the spirit of the Lord I've never felt like that before And in Records and Tapes, the Narrator recalls that that's how it really happened: Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword Spooked by the spirit of Samuel The fence is mentioned explicitly a few times: in Hostile, Mass., Charlemagne is described In the Back Bay fens getting gentle Up against the fence with some guy who looks like Mickey Mantle where "the Back Bay fens," following the Hostile Massachusetts metaphor, are the wet areas around Phalen creek in the middle of Swede Hollow (the Party Pit); "getting gentle," because the fight is fake; "up against the fence," because it's his image projected on the fence screen that's in the fight; "with some guy who looks like Mickey Mantle" because of the crew cut. And in Sweet Payne, it's the first of the listed hazards in which the kids find themselves: We got tangled in electrical fences Of course, in order to project the image, they have to film it first. That's what's happening in this passage, reported by the Narrator [SS]: Upstairs at some hesher's apartment Underneath some posters of panthers That one guy in camouflage dancing Eyes shut with his arms out like Christ The other guy was licking his knife And then it went white We've mentioned the fact that Gideon always lives upstairs; this is in his apartment on Columbus Ave. His hair's grown out in his years away from the Skins, so he's a hesher now. Charlemagne is being filmed, "camouflaged" like a townie in sweatpants (he has to blend in with the Party Pit crowd until Judas betrays him), dancing at first, then kneeling [ABlues] with his eyes shut and his arms out like Christ, all following Mary's description of her vision. The "other guy licking his knife" is again Gideon, but he's not just doing it to set the scene. More on this tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 20, 2016 13:43:30 GMT -5
I agree it's more to this than a puzzle. A puzzle implies you just have to put the pieces in the right order or place. But this is pretty far beyond that. Just the way characters appears, what signifiers are tied to them and how space and time is floating, but the story keeps coherent - it's just amazing. And this thread has (re)opened my eyes for just how great of a songwriter Craig Finn is. As you'd seen, I've revisited quite a few Lifter Puller songs the last couple of weeks as well. And even without the patience to sit down and get a real grip of the narrative as a whole, but just single lines, rhyme patterns, images and metaphors - quite many of them are simply mind blowing. 4 Dix, man. La Quereria. Let's Get Incredible. This stuff is just magnificent, even without having a clue about the story. I was going to post another quote, but we'll better save it till Stay Alive Carl is allright, and you'll be able to dig into Lifter Puller yourself.
I never knew how much of the solo lyrics who actually have similarities to Hold Steady. I thought I knew every Hold Steady lyric pretty well, but some details have slipped my mind (even when I'm on the 75th listen, like you). I've heard the words, sang along to them, but never really reflected on each word. A lot of the solo stuff now seems even more exciting. Even if there might be no narrative link between the universes, the similarities and links in language, words and themes is still pretty thrilling.
To be right about or close to something here makes me more happy than I thought it would. Now I'm thinking hard about the Holly part. And I've stumbled upon with a few lines that triggers my interest, even if I'm not sure they're about Holly and/or the show we're about to hear about, at all. More on that later tonight if I have som free time. But I think it's fair to say that I'm more searching than concluding.
About CSTLN - I don't think I have much more to add. I know there's a lot there. But I'll just have to wait for you to wrap it up :-)
...and maybe start to make some notes after all. I had something quite figured out at one of my walks with the trolley today, but it slipped my mind.
Thoughts to Stay Alive Carl. And I'm keeping fingers crossed for another post early morning, european time.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 20, 2016 22:04:42 GMT -5
The level of care he's put into his work is off the charts. Sometimes it makes me laugh how easily things seem to fall into his hand; the Ray Cappo story, for example, with "Shelter" and "Krishna" and the "7th Street Entry" --- I mean, come on, how the fuck did he do that? There's just a massive amount of attention to detail there, both in looking at things around him for material, and in crafting his own stuff.
And not just for the story, but for the sound, too. I used to listen to a lot of Dylan years back, and as good as he is, he used to piss me off sometimes with his just-write-whatever-you-want-to-say-and-it'll-fit approach (I remember a quote about some friend watching him crank out the lyrics to Brownsville Girl, I think it was, reading over his shoulder; at one point the friend said "hey, that doesn't fit the rhythm" and Dylan said "don't worry, it'll work out" and just kept typing. In Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, he's got one verse that opens with a line of 18 syllables crammed in on top of each other, while the next opens with a line of only 11, dragged out to cover the gaps between notes. Craig never does that. He treats every note like an opportunity. That was something that blew my mind the first time I heard YLHF, Tad kept grooving those fat pitches and Craig squared up on every single one of them ("damn right you'll rise again," "I'm kinda saving myself for the scene," and "there were just too many kids" ... I mean, are you fucking kidding me).
You can put some Didion topspin on it, tell yourself "I write to find out what Craig Finn's thinking" :-)
There's a lot of stuff about the crucifixion and so many moving parts ... I'm sure there's a best way through it, but I don't know what it is. Let me keep going with what's in front of me.
So, they're going to fake Charlemagne's death; the goal is to make him disappear so that both the cops and the Skins will stop looking for him. They're going to set up a "play" in which he (in reality, his projected image) appears to be stabbed, and people will believe that he was killed, that's great. But he's still alive. So how does he disappear?
There's no end of clues about this, but I think it was listening to One for the Cutters that let me see it the first time:
The night with the fight and the butterfly knife Was the first night she spent with that one guy she liked ... The girl takes the stand and she swears she was with him Her father's lawyers do most of the talking
We've seen all the stuff about Cherry from the Outsiders, siding with greaser Johnny after he stabs her boyfriend, so we're prepared for most of the above --- except for one part of it: "that one guy she liked." That bit is strange; we know there's only one guy Mary likes, and that's Charlemagne, the victim.
Of course he's not really the victim, since it's his image that gets stabbed, not him.
Which, come to think of it, means that he's available to play a different role in this production.
And that's what happens. While Gideon's on top of the water tower directing the show, Charlemagne's down on the stage, with his head shaved, playing the role of Gideon.
Where to start? There was the line from Saddle Shop I quoted yesterday; after they finish filming Charlemagne for the magic trick, we get
The other guy was licking his knife
which is a description of Gideon preparing to use his knife. Then we can go to Runner's High for a bust-out-laughing shot of him using it:
Dude you've got to sit still if you want me to save you.
It's just what it sounds like ... Charlemagne's bouncing around like a little kid while Gideon's giving him a haircut.
You see where this is leading, right? Charlemagne is going to have to assume the role of Gideon, not just for the night of the crucifixion, but both before and after it; before, so that "Gideon" can reappear from his years of exile at the tire shop and get back in with the Skins; after, because that's going to be his identity for as long as the search for Charlemagne is still going on.
The result is that we're treated to a few songs in which the voice is the voice of Gideon, but it's really Charlemagne speaking. Not to jump ahead, but after the crucifixion, some stuff happens which results in Charlemagne getting stopped by the cops under suspicious circumstances. Unfortunately for him, at the time (as noted at the end of CiS), he's got some sweet stuff tucked into his socks:
I got stopped by the cops and they found it in my socks And I got probed
and so the cops decide to hold him for interrogation ... Muzzle, this is for you:
They put the screws into Charlemagne He had a detox dream he saw Christ in all his glory Charlemagne didn't feel any pain But he's bleeding from the holes in his story
He said, "Hey my name's Corey. I'm really into hardcore. People call me Hard Corey. Don't you hate these clever people And all these clever people parties"
That's Charlemagne with the cops, doing his best lost-his-mind-when-they-jumped-him-in Gideon imitation. But it's a pretty shaky story, and he's not going to talk his way out of it ...
While we're here, take note of that "Hey" --- that's pure Gideon style, in imitation of the gangsters, like the "Hey Bloomington" dealer who Charlemagne meets at the Southtown Shopping Center in SG. All of the following are Gideon, or Charlemagne imitating Gideon:
- Hey, my name's Corey [HM] - Hey hey, Providence [SK] - Hey, sweet recovery [BCamp] - Hi, I like to party on the problem blocks [BCamp] - Hey, New York City [ASD]
Some impressive shit there. Not everybody can write so much with an offhand syllable.
To bring this detour full circle, we get a view of the interrogation itself in Hot Soft Light, another crazy ass-backwards truth-in-insanity epic; one of the crazy Gideon-things Charlemagne says, which however happens to be strictly true, is
I was Lake and Columbus, I was cutting off all my hair
So, yeah, the haircut took place in Gideon's apartment (this confirms, too, that the apartment is located with the tire shop on the Lake Street end of the divided block). And take another look at OftC, where Mary is thinking about "that one guy she liked." Here Craig sets us up again with an expert piece of misdirection early on:
The girls gave her glares but the boys were quite pleasant To be perfectly honest, they didn't seem much different
The townies weren't that different from people like her, right? Right, they aren't that different. But a few lines later we get the same words with a totally different meaning:
He didn't seem that different except for that blood on his jacket He didn't seem that different except for maybe his haircut He didn't seem much different
Charlemagne didn't seem that different **from his former self**, except for the blood on his jacket, and of course the haircut.
At this point it's clear that Charlemagne is the "guy who looks like Mickey Mantle" with the buzz cut in Hostile, Mass., getting tangled with his own image in the electrical fence at the edge of the clearing in the Party Pit.
Muzzle, as you know I hadn't heard of Just Saying until you pointed it out to me, and it's true that I don't think it's a source of new info about the story; but knowing that Charlemagne ends up as a doppelgaenger for Gideon puts a totally new construction on some of these lines:
Not exactly brothers And certainly not lovers Just put us down as an old friendship We've been through complications, Complicated situations We ain't even at the end yet ... Man, I'm not saying you're not free I'm just saying That you're so much like me And I'm so much like you The things we used to do And the things that we went through Now we're old enough to laugh At the folly of our youth ...
A couple of other minor things from OftC, while we're here:
It's a "butterfly knife" because "butterfly" stands in contrast to all the stinging/biting insects which are normally used as metaphors for the Skins. Charlemagne is among the Skins pretending to be Gideon, but he's a gangster without a sting.
She gave him a ride to some kid's house in Cleveland He stayed there for two weeks, the cops finally found him
These lines really threw me for a loop for a while. It was pretty early on that I realized that this wasn't Cleveland, Ohio, but someplace in the Twin Cities. The problem is that there's actually a north side neighborhood in Minneapolis called "Cleveland" (Charlemagne touches the corner of it on his way back up to the Quarry at the end of SG). So for a long time I was trying to sort out a post-crucifixion story centered around possible events up there.
But eventually I realized that this is another bit of misdirection on Craig's part. He puts those two lines in right after "the night with the fight" to make you think that Mary gave the boy a ride after the stabbing. But in fact there's no connective wording there --- hearing it, we just assume that we're getting things in chronological/causal order (he plays this trick in a number of other places as well, Multitude of Casualties being a major example). The ride in question is when she first drives him to Gideon's place on Columbus, to hide and to get help. And "Cleveland" is so named for the same reason that "Michigan" is so named --- because Columbus between 28th and Lake is divided into two parts separated by a gap, and Cleveland was the only US President to have two terms of office separated by a gap. (Note, while we're here, the term "stayed"; that's the same word that both Jesse and the Narrator use for Charlemagne's time there, w/ "the place you're staying" [CF] and "while you were still staying there" [Ambassador], respectively.)
From this we know that Charlemagne stayed at Gideon's place for two weeks, and then the cops caught up with him. That part of the story we get from Jesse:
They said they came to the place you're staying You went out the window and since then noone's seen you
In fact, Charlemagne didn't go out the window; he was still in the apartment. But the cops didn't recognize him, and no one saw him after that, because from that point on he looked like Gideon.
At this point every new line opens up about twenty other things that we could easily talk about. But that's more than enough for today, so I'll stop here.
Shit is getting fun now; I hope I'm managing to convey even a fraction of the sheer mad joy of the whole thing. Thank you for reading this far, and if you can take a moment in the middle of it to remember Still Alive Carl, thank you for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 21, 2016 20:27:23 GMT -5
There's a bit more from the two weeks on Columbus Ave that I need to wrap up, including a couple of minor things that I forgot in passing. Let me start with those and then get back to the big picture. Preparation for the show ----------------------------------- Going through The Ambassador we skipped the nights/days bits, but we can look at those now: The nights were hot and hissing like an iron. The days spent climbing walls like a vine. ... The nights were hot and hissing like an iron. The days were cold and crushed you like a can. Years spent faking pain and making plans. These lines refer to the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon's preparations for the show they're going to put on. "The days spent climbing walls" refer to climbing the water tower in the Party Pit. "The nights were hot and hissing" refer to building and working with the projector. We don't have a lot of evidence for the "hissing" of the projector now, but we'll pick up more later. "The days were cold" because it's still March; spring is coming but just getting started (and they're outdoors climbing the tower during the day, whereas their night work with the projector was "upstairs in some hesher's apartment" [SS]). The anxiety and anticipation made the two weeks seem like years (in the same way that "hours" and "months" and "years" in Multitude of Casualties are all used to refer to the same period of time); they got through it faking pain "to get a prescription" [GoaH], and making their plans. Constructive Summer is about them actually climbing the water tower; the second verse has a couple of great lines in it: This old town is lifeless Been that way our whole lives, just Work at the mill until you die Work at the mill and then you die The water tower is at the southern end of Hamm's Brewery, originally both a brewery and flour mill ( wikipedia); "mill" is a reference to this. (The Brewery was abandoned in 2004, when this scene takes place; it's not absurd for them to be working up there in broad daylight.) The particular insistence on "and then you die" is an in-joke; the Narrator is referring to the fact that they're going to finish their "work" setting up the theater, and then Charlemagne is going to "die." Biblical parallels ----------------------- In talking about the Skins "falling on the floor" at the sight of Charlemagne's spirit, I forgot to mention that there's a Biblical allusion here too. In the garden, when the officers with Judas come up to arrest Jesus (and Peter draws his sword), Jesus identifies himself [John 18:6]: This isn't just a one-off parallel; as we'll see, practically every aspect of the crucifixion scene is related to Craig's Twin Cities rewrite of early church history. The magic trick ---------------------- Back to the plan. There are actually two distinct parts to Gideon's magic trick: 1) creating the special-effects "ghost" of Charlemagne. 2) propagating the rumor of his death. In relation to the second, there's one verse of Stevie Nix that we still haven't looked at, a passage in which Holly describes Mary speaking to Gideon: She said you remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young You've got passion and you think that you're sexy and all the punks think that you're dumb The guys around the lockers got a story about the stomach pump And the guys behind the theater found a body in the garbage dump In the context of Holly's party, this has a straightforward meaning. The punks on the front lawn are making jokes about Gideon, calling him Stevie Nicks because of the magician's cape and the "white bird" on his arm. But Mary says he reminds her more of Rod Stewart: - He's got passion and thinks he's sexy, maybe because of the psycho eyes [Swish, BBreathing, etc.], more likely just because he's high on speed & looking for sex [SN, MM, etc.] (compare the Stewart songs Passion and Do You Think I'm Sexy). - He's trying to attach a myth to himself, that he's a tough guy and a killer [Knuckles], with the help of a story about guys behind the theater finding a body in the garbage dump (compare the myth about the stomach pump attached to Stewart). Mary's only just said the last line, when the music slows and gets funny. It's not clear if she's having a prophetic moment, or if her words have some independent suggestive power. But either way, they foreshadow the future in which it will be up to Gideon to create the myth of Charlemagne's crucifixion. This link between Gideon's "magic trick" and myth-creation is indicated both by the Stevie Nix long black shawl context, and by The Ambassador, in which it's noted that his trick involves something more than special effects: Man it feels kind of magical. I guess your friend can really move things with his mind. But the link is drawn much more strongly by Craig himself in the 2005 MAGNET interview ( link). Speaking of Separation Sunday, he says: There it is, apropos of Stevie Nix, in Craig's own words: urban myth is magic. Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night makes clear that Gideon's hand in propagating the myth --- the gospel of Charlemagne's crucifixion --- is another function of his role as the Holy Spirit. (See the account of Pentecost [Acts 2], in which "the Holy Ghost" came with a sound like "a mighty wind" to fill the Apostles, led by Peter, on the day that they began preaching to the world.) Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the Dead End Alley Yeah, he told him what to celebrate And I met William Butler Yeats, Sunday Night Dance Party, summer 1988 At first I thought it might be William Blake We mix our own mythologies, we push them out through PA systems We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen And I'm not saying we could save you, but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself If you don't get born again at least you'll get high as hell The POV character is the Narrator, speaking from a later time, having left the Twin Cities to go to New York. He begins by recalling that the spirit of Nelson Algren (author of Chicago: City on the Make) came to Paddy of Dillinger Four at a party at the Dead End Alley, and told him what to celebrate. This frames the key idea of the song: being in a band is an apostolic office; you receive the gospel ("came to Paddy ... told him"), and you spread it ("what to celebrate"). The Narrator, too, like Peter at Pentecost, has been called by the Spirit (again, Gideon as the Holy Ghost [SM, BCamp, A&H, etc.]). He first met Gideon at a Youth of Today show at the 7th Street Entry "Sunday Night Dance Party" in the summer of 1988 (the liner notes have "YOT??" next to this line; the same Youth of Today show is described in BBreathing). At first he thought Gideon's gospel might be the "violent red visions" of William Blake's Revelation [CatCT], a call for war of revenge on the Skins ("war" [CatCT vs. Knuckles, GLS], "revenge" [C&N, Ambassador], "vengeance" [HSL]); but it turned out to be the myth-mixing of William Butler Yeats instead. (BBreathing has a parallel account of these two impressions; there's the violence of the "Youth of Today" concert at their first meeting, and the non-violence of "Shelter" on their second encounter. This is analogous to the double-take described in Knuckles, too: Gideon's been trying to get everyone to call him tough guy names, like "Freddy Knuckles," but instead they keep pegging him as a softie, like "Right Said Fred.") There's more to the early church history parallel, but we'll save the rest for the crucifixion itself. Here are three of William Blake's "Great Red Dragon Paintings" of scenes from the Book of Revelation ( wikipedia), alluded to in "William Blake" [CSTLN], "violent red visions" [CatCT], and "Revelation songs" [CF]: The Number of the Beast is 666 The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun That's enough for today. Tomorrow I should be able to wrap up the Columbus Ave period and start on the next episode. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by kayfaberaven on Feb 21, 2016 21:00:00 GMT -5
Theory: skepticatfirst is actually Craig, tired of not getting enough credit for his amazing lyrics and overarching story.
But seriously, thanks for this. It's a really fun read, and it's caused me to revisit some songs with new perspective. In particular, I'm getting a lot more enjoyment out of a few of the songs on the back half of Almost Killed Me (Knuckles, Sketchy Metal and Sweet Payne) that I always thought weren't quite up the standard of almost all of the other songs in the catalogue.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 23, 2016 1:21:59 GMT -5
Ha, thanks man, I'm glad this is stirring up a fresh look at the music. And yeah, I always liked Sweet Payne a lot, but I know exactly what you mean about Sketchy Metal and Knuckles. For my money Knuckles is a real sleeper --- of all the songs it seems almost too simple to bother with, but every so often I get a major surprise coming back to it. There's one big thing that comes in to play after the crucifixion that I just noticed like a month ago. We'll get there pretty soon.
Let's recap to see what we're missing. The whole point of staging the crucifixion is to take control of the fulfillment of Mary's vision themselves; that means reproducing every element of it exactly. So, over to Both Crosses for a checklist:
She saw all the footage right before it got cut She saw all the bodies and she saw all the blood She saw the angel put a sword in his side Baby, that's how we got canonized
So far we're not missing any elements of the plan. We do want to stop to appreciate a few other things though:
- the double entendre of "footage" and "cut" (how many layers of pun are there in "cutters" now?), and "canon"-ized, since they're actually screening a film. (There ought to be a word for this kind of thing, where Craig seems to be using a metaphor or an expression, but in fact is speaking literally ...) - the "bodies" and "blood": it appears that Gideon will be presiding over another mass (muzzle, you called this). - the "angel": we already talked about Gideon as the angel of Death, and the angel with the flaming sword at the entrance to Eden, but it's good to keep these in mind as we get into the crucifixion itself.
She saw him gushing blood right before he got cut She saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk She saw the guys coming in from the sides Baby, that's how we get energized
Once again we've been set up by an earlier line ("she saw all the footage before it got cut") to miss at least some of the literal meaning of "she saw him gushing blood right before he got cut"; of course, Charlemagne released the special-effects blood before he was ever actually cut. At any rate, they're going to need some blood for the stabbing scene.
Similarly, the first time we hear "She saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk / She saw the guys coming in from the sides," we imagine that this is a vision of the Skins preparing to dispose of the body, and closing in on the victim from the sides (never mind that the order of the two events is backward). But now that we know Charlemagne and the others are staging the scene themselves, we understand what's really happening: it's they who are spiriting away the evidence of the "body." Which means they'll need a bag (which is trivial), and a car. Of course, Mary's the one who has a car [TSPotC, OftC]. Her vision of "the guys coming in from the sides" is a view from the driver's seat of her own friends piling into the backseat to make their escape.
She saw the film right before it came out At first she thought Judas might go for the mouth She saw the nails. She saw the hands She saw the crowd. She heard the band
We need to pause a moment to pay respect to the world-class line "At first she thought Judas might go for the mouth." But having done that, we know what else we're missing now. They're going to need Judas. Back in the Milkcrate Mosh timeframe, Judas was Holly, and there are a lot of "wiped at her nose and she winked" occasions (still to come) which hint at another occasion for betrayal on her part. The only problem with this is that Holly's long gone.
But we've just concluded that Mary's going to be at the scene. And Mary's Holly's cousin.
In the same way that people haven't seen Gideon for seven years, making a Charlemagne/Gideon double passable, no one's seen Holly for seven years either.
And so it turns out that the First Night lines
Holly's insatiable, she still looks incredible But she don't look like the same girl we met
are **strictly literal**. Mary will be down with Charlemagne on stage, playing the role of Holly.
We'll skip "she saw the nails. She saw the hands" for now. But "she saw the crowd. She heard the band" is important. The crowd is the crowd of Skins all around them, their audience. And the band [YGD, CSTLN, HSL, TSPotC, A&H, OWL] is the Narrator ...
The new kid begged them not to do it Jesus just said, "I still love you Judas Since you've been up in Massachusetts I keep dreaming about dos cruces"
Following on "she heard the band," we understand that "the new kid" is the Narrator; Holly (played by Mary) and Gideon (played by Charlemagne) both have histories with the Skins, so they can pretty much pick up where they left off. But the Narrator, whose help they need both to help carry the "body" bag, and to raise the dramatic pitch of the staged event, has to establish a role for himself as the "new kid."
So this takes us (if I haven't forgotten something) to the last remaining scene from the two weeks that Charlemagne is staying with Gideon on Columbus, namely, the Banging Camp theater episode.
The POV character of Banging Camp is the Narrator. The song starts with him having accompanied Mary and Charlemagne to the theater, where the two of them are sitting in the back, rehearsing for their imminent "re-entry" into the world of the Skins. The idea is that they'll reintroduce themselves to the gang and then bide their time, in the relative safety of the gang's company, until the next party down at the Party Pit, where they'll finally put their plan into action.
Holly wore a string around her finger She said it helps her to remember all the nights that we got over And besides, it ties her outfit all together Holly wore a string around her finger
"Holly" (Mary) wore a string around her finger to help her remember all the things she's supposed to remember as Holly, including the nights of the years that she was gone. Besides, it ties her outfit all together; Mary's rehearsing the role of Holly, but she's still dressed like Mary, in her "standard issue" skimpy clothes [HM, BCamp, SPotC, NS, Weekenders].
There are strings attached to every single lover But they still can't even tether us together Listen to the back of the theater, I think they really love one another There are strings attached to every single lover
There are strings attached to every single lover, the Narrator thinks, but even so they aren't enough to keep him connected to Mary (see "tethered" [TOT]). Listen to Mary-as-Holly and Charlemagne-as-Gideon talking in the back of the theater, he thinks, sounding just how he and Mary did when they used to spend time back there, not messing around, but just talking [HM, AE], as if in fulfillment of Christ's command to love one another as He has loved us [John 15:12]; they're sounding like they really love one another, even though they're rehearsing the roles of a different pair of lovers entirely.
When they say great white sharks They mean the kind in big black cars When they say killer whales They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in penetration park
Charlemagne, in Gideon's voice (see the "black and tans" lines below), is practicing the Skins' slang, as taught to him by Mary. "When the Skins say 'great white sharks', they mean the kind in big black cars; when they say 'killer whales' they mean they whaled on Charlemagne until they killed him up in Penetration Park" (this last in reference to the metal bar beatdown).
"Great Red Shark" and "White Whale" are the names of the two cars driven by the main characters of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (also referenced in C&N, and possibly in a few other songs).
It's worth underlining that these lines are actually the Narrator quoting Charlemagne imitating Gideon repeating after Mary. There are reasons why it's such a difficult song to parse ...
Holly wore a cross to ward them off She said if they think you're a Christian then they won't bring in the dogs And if they think you're a Catholic then they'll want to meet your boss Holly wore a cross to ward them off
The Narrator continues: "Holly" (Mary) wore a cross to ward the vampire (biting insect metaphor) Skins off; she said if they think you're a Christian then they won't bring in the dogs to attack you (compare the later IHTWTDFY, where they're actually "building a bunker down by the river"); and if they think you're a Catholic then they'll look on you with actual favor, and will welcome your guy" --- Charlemagne-as-Gideon, in this case. (Again this is all Mary reporting on the Skins, whom she knows well.)
Yeah, there's camps down by the banks of the river And it's sketchy in the night but they mostly lay low in the light Hey sweet recovery, come on, won't you wade into the water with me? You know, there's camps down by the banks of the river
The Narrator continues for two lines, setting the scene of the riverbank events, and then Charlemagne speaks again, imitating Gideon speaking to Holly at the time of the baptism; this part we've covered.
When they say black and tans You know they mean the kind from the cans We don't got time to mix it all together I'm a very busy man, man
Again Charlemagne practices their slang, in Gideon's voice. (The black-and-tans metaphor is something we should expand on --- running out of gas now, I'll do it tomorrow.)
She said I dig those awkward silences 'Cause I grew up in denial and went to school in Massachusetts He said hi, I like to party on the problem blocks And I can't stand it when the banging stops
And finally, one more exchange, this time quoting "Holly" (Mary) directly rather than paraphrasing her speech: she practices a two-line vignette of herself as Holly, in Holly's voice, and Charlemagne does the same for himself as Gideon, in Gideon's voice. We've already explored the meaning of what they're saying; the important thing now is to undrestand the reason for their saying it, to see that they're settling into their roles. They're pretty much ready to go now.
Falling asleep so I'll stop there. On to the next stage tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and again for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 23, 2016 15:37:02 GMT -5
I haven't really had the time to come with even the shortest comment here the past couple of days, but I read the last part earlier today, and it was pretty exciting stuff. Is this opening up a whole new field of 50/50 interpretations? I mean, there must be quite a few places where a quote from either Gideon or Holly now can be read as something said by Charlemagne or Mary. And the skeptical part of me thinks this makes it - in the lack of a better word - easier. Or at least doubling up on opportunities to interpret a certain part in a certain way. Then again, as with everything else, all you bring up here makes sense.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 23, 2016 23:53:44 GMT -5
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Fortunately, I don't think it's that bad --- Banging Camp is a real outlier, and even that has clear clues: the tattered outfit (Mary), the back of the theater (Mary), the Narrator following at a distance (Mary), the strange exchange of self-introductions between Holly and Gideon ("Holly" and "Gideon"). As we move forward things will generally be clearer; offhand, I can't think of anything ahead of us that isn't pretty tightly constrained. For the rest, I think you can have confidence that Craig's control over the story is going to exclude unsatisfyingly arbitrary readings. So at worst, if I screw it up and go with a reading that looks too "easy," you can toss that out and look for a better one, or you can call me on it. I said I would pick up the "black and tans" thing today. This is another metaphor for the Skins: in Knuckles we're introduced to them as "militiamen" at war with the law; the Black and Tans ( wikipedia) were an English paramilitary force stationed in Ireland from 1919-22 for the purpose of fighting the Irish Republican Army. There are a few references to "black and tans" in the songs, as well as a few related allusions. In Curves & Nerves, Making love with the black and tans can be read as "drinking a lot of black and tans," in the sense of the beer drinks made of layered ale and stout ( wikipedia); but the secondary implication is that she's turning tricks with the Skins, which after all she is also doing [Swish, C&N, etc.]. The dealer in Southtown Girls is identified as a gangster both by his "Hey Bloomington" style of speaking, and his black and tan colors: Meet me right in front of the Rainbow Foods I got a brown paper bag and black buckle shoes In Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night, the "Irish" are the Irish cops of Nelson Algren's Chicago, as opposed to the English militiamen of the Black and Tans; the switch from English William Blake to Irish Yeats, as we've already seen, represents the switch from taking end-times violence to the Skins, to taking an urban myth to the cops. (I did already mention that Charlemagne's "bleeding from the holes in his story" comes with his interrogation by the cops.) These are some pretty damn impressive symmetries, and this isn't even all there is to it. We'll talk about this a lot more when we get to Charlemagne's arrest, and to CSTLN. (Here's a fun one: in CSTLN, we get the following lines: Hey Nelson Algren, Chicago seemed tired last night They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes Hey William Butler Yeats, all the Irish seemed wired last night They tried to separate our girls from our guys If you assume I'm right about Irish/Chicago being the cops, and the cigarettes glowing red in the darkness because they're behind an interrogation lamp, what does "They tried to separate our girls from our guys" refer to? I'm looking for a three-word phrase that gets repeated like 10 times, so it's not obscure ...) Finally, there's "When they say black and tans" of Banging Camp. This is another over-the-top backwards joke: "great white sharks" and "killer whales" are supposed to be cryptic supremacist gangland allusions, but "black and tans," a straight-up fascist paramilitary handle (and used with that meaning in C&N), just refers to the drink. Fantastic stuff. All right. Charlemagne stays at Gideon's apartment on Columbus for two weeks, then the cops track him down and he disappears. We know that he's cut his hair and is now pretending to be Gideon. What happens next? The main thing that happens is that Charlemagne-as-Gideon, Mary-as-Holly, and the Narrator-as-the-new-kid join up with the Skins both to make themselves known again, and to wait for the next party at the Party Pit, where they can execute their plan and fake Charlemagne's death once and for all. There are a few songs that tell us about this period. One of them is Saddle Shoes. The POV character here is the Narrator, disguised as the "new kid": Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up He's coming off some problem block Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot We're sleeping at the saddle shop Again, the "saddle shop" is the Schatzlein Saddle Shop at 413 Lake Street (at Grand and Lake), kitty-corner from the Yukon Club, and two blocks east of Lyndale and Lake where the Skins are dealing "silver metal flake" [R&T]. This is middle-country on Lake Street, about a mile west of Gideon's apartment on Columbus and a little less than a mile east of Charlemagne and the Narrator's apartment on Hennepin. We've already talked about Shepard. The really interesting line here is "Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot": the Narrator, terrified that they're going to get caught, is anxiously watching Mary break character; instead of retreating into awkward silence as Holly does when she gets high [BBlues, BCamp], she wants to talk a lot. It's been that kind of summer We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever I'm not sure what to do with "summer" here --- I had forgotten about this. Muzzle already guessed that the crucifixion happens at the "Easter mass" of HaRRF, and that's right; I've been taking "Easter" (and the cold days of Ambassador) literally and assuming we are presently in mid-April. But that's a bit early for summer. Maybe "summer" here is figurative, or maybe "Easter" is (the constraining dates work out either way). Or maybe there's another explanation. "We tried to stay with your sister" means that they tried to stay with Mary, the real Mary ("Holly's" "sister" on account of the fact that "Holly's" real identity is Mary; this reading is confirmed below). They tried to stay in Mary's room down at the Ambassador, to be close by the Party Pit for whenever things finally kick off; but they've ended up getting dragged along with the Skins from wherever to "wherever." The "fifteen days" is key; this links Saddle Shoes with a couple of other songs describing the same time period. It "feels like forever" because they've been living through total insanity among the Skins; some of that is described with "somebody took a couple shots / the neighbors went and called the cops" below, but there's a lot more elsewhere, which we'll pick up in the next day or two. The Wild West begins where your body ends So keep your bandages clean The Wild West begins right where your body ends Blacked out in blue jeans Here the Narrator is addressing Mary: he warns her, "the Wild West begins right where your body ends / Blacked out in blue jeans"; "blacked out in blue jeans" is a description of the Skins, "dripping wet in western wear" [LA], in the Party Pit, "Where townies would gather and drink until blackout" [OftC]. We remember too that the C&N "video" version of the crucifixion involved "screams and jeans and curves and nerves": the screams are to come when they see the ghost and the murder; these are the jeans. And because they are all around her, the Narrator is begging Mary to stay powered down and not let her stigmata bleed, which will give them all away. Shepard showed up then somebody took a couple shots The neighbors went and called the cops Didn't make a difference when the owners came and changed the locks We still sleep at the saddle shop It's been that kind of summer We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever She appeared faithless in fringes and feathers It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever More Shepard, more violence. The "sister" is now identified as the girl who appeared faithless in fringes and feathers; we recall that this was Mary, the "white swan" of SN, at Holly's party with the tattered white T-shirt saying "what would Judas do?" The song goes on with the bit we've already seen about the filming in Gideon's apartment, and some information about the crucifixion itself. But there are two more things that relate to this intermediate period that we should deal with here: Nine stitches and bandages This is apparently why Charlemagne and Mary went to see the "doctors" as reported in Runners High: they wanted to get the stigmata stitched up to prevent her from giving herself away by bleeding. However, this measure seems not to be working very reliably; and the expression "nine stitches" itself (as in the saying "a stitch in time saves nine"; wiktionary) suggests that it's a case of too little too late. I never rode a horse but I'm sleeping at the saddle shop And so are most of my friends The Narrator, Charlemagne and Mary are there; only Gideon and Jesse are missing. (Alternatively, in view of their disguises, he may be counting Charlemagne, Gideon, Mary, and Holly as being there, and in that case Jesse is the only one who isn't sleeping at the saddle shop. More on her tomorrow.) I don't think I'm getting the best results writing so late but there's still a lot of ground to cover, so let me run with this. Thank you for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Feb 24, 2016 3:43:07 GMT -5
I haven't got time for a longer reply (but I find the tales about the period where they are blending in with the Skins to be really great), but as usual I just wanted to drop a Lifter Puller line. Again, I'm not saying there's even the slightest connection here, but again, the images of troubadours (musicians, "the band"), mentions of a "war" and "the waiting game" at the end at least rings a few bells:
We are the troubadours And these are the news reports Here we are in the holy war Getting lost in the liquor store Making love to hardwood floors Now we go into the 4/4
We did the black and the tans, into the black and the blue We did the Goats Head Soup, into the Tattoo You And the crazy fruity drinks you made The Grey Goose and the Gatorade The liquid tan and lemonade Made love to the waiting game
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 25, 2016 0:03:37 GMT -5
Yeah, that's pretty amazing ... among parallels from The Hold Steady universe there's "scene reports," "blacked out in blue jeans," like you say the "black and tans," the "band," "war" and the waiting game, and even some more distant stuff like "vodka ice and gatorade." I mean I don't know what to make of it either, but I'm really curious to see whether these same building blocks get put together in support of some bigger thing, or some different thing, and in either case, what. Let me keep going with the incognito-among-the-Skins period. Another song that gives us some info about it is Going on a Hike (POV character is the Narrator). There isn't really any new information here, but there's reinforcement of some info we already have, and it's worth parsing: We come in to the prairie Waiting out in the heat The "prairie" is the Wild-West-themed area around the saddle shop, the Yukon club, and Lyndale and Lake; following the mountain/canyon metaphor of the song, it's somewhere in the middle, neither one nor the other; they're stuck, waiting, between Uptown/Lowertown. As noted above, this is the "waiting" time --- waiting for the Skins to go back down to the Party Pit. In the meantime they're having a pretty hot time of it, with Shepard and shots and cops and staying wherever [SS]. A couple motels and a couple saloons They can eat a couple of weeks up Living among the Skins means accompanying them as "they counted money in the motels / they mostly sold it on the malls" [SN], like the real Gideon and Holly used to do; we saw that counting money in the motels is alluded to in Saddle Shoes also: "Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up" [SS]. The "saloons" include the Yukon club, across the street from the saddle shop (and maybe the Round Up Saloon too, mentioned by Craig in the 2004 Cloak and Dagger interview: link). A "couple weeks" is the same "fifteen days" mentioned in Saddle Shoes. I saw a small town parade and the lead majorette She made me feel all weak in the knees The Narrator saw Mary there, identified by his memories of the prom; she's the "majorette" from OWL, who made him "weak in the knees" going down on her [MN]. Hard to say what the "parade" is. Hot shot in the city in the middle of the prairie Waiting out in the heat Same as above, but with the added indication that the "prairie" is in the city. Waiting out in the heat Cos you can't get to heaven from the cliche canyon You get tired when you're halfway up the mountain "You get tired" waiting; "it's been fifteen days but it feels like forever." Again, "halfway up the mountain" is their neither-here-nor-there station on Lake Street between Uptown and Lowertown. We get a massively more fun account of the same two weeks in Ask Her For Adderall. Here again the Narrator is the POV character; he's talking to Charlemagne about Jesse, and giving him some messages to pass on, in case he hears from her and she asks about him. The messages give a pretty good idea of just how insane things have been since they joined up with the Skins: If she asks, don't tell her that I'm living hand-to-mouth Don't tell her I've been sleeping on your couch If she asks just tell her that we opened for the Stones It's her favorite band except for The Ramones The "opened for the Stones" bit identifies the POV character as the Narrator; "favorite band except for the Ramones" (see also "favorite groups" [40B]) identifies "her" as Jesse. His "sleeping on your couch" identifies the person he's talking to as Charlemagne; disguised as Gideon (see below), he and Mary (disguised as Holly) are sharing a bed with a strict no-touching rule (not kidding, there is evidence for this; we'll get to it soon), while the third-wheel Narrator is on the couch. "Living hand-to-mouth" is just the beginning of the insanity ... If she happens to suggest a love based on trust and respect Tell her I've been wasted since last week If she wants to stop on by, tell her that I almost died Tell her I ain't seeing people yet But see if she'll send cigarettes He's been "wasted since last week"; they're near the end of the same "couple of weeks" and "fifteen days" described in GoaH and SS, respectively. There's been a lot of drugs ("wasted") and violence ("I almost died") in that time. The request for "cigarettes" further confirms that it's Jesse he's talking about. If she asks, don't tell her about the bloodshed in the streets The less she knows, the less she can repeat If she happens to bring up the pinpricks and the throwing up Tell her it's just part of growing up The "bloodshed in the streets" confirms that they've been caught up in the Skins' street fights (more than just the "couple shots" of SS). The fact that the Skins are in full Cowboy mode at this time, and that Shepard is shortly seen with "blood on his boots and an arrow through his hat" [LA], strongly suggests that the street fights in question are the ongoing wars in the "Indian fringes" [SPayne]. It's the combination of these facts: - that the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Mary are present for at least one of the Cowboys-Indians street slaughters [AHfA] - that Mary is referred to during this time as appearing "faithless in [implicitly Indian] fringes and feathers" [SS] - that the Narrator now "almost died" [AHfA] while Charlemagne "almost died up by Edina High" [HH] - that we have no other evidence of Charlemagne being near Edina High outside the closing lines of HH - that the title Hornets! Hornets! clearly associates the heavy stuff, including the Edina High episode, in suburban Minneapolis with the Skins (stinging insect metaphor) - that there is a warren of streets named after Indian tribes connecting Edina High with the frontage roads of 169, in the suburban fringes - that these streets are only a few (maybe 4?) miles SW of the Cityscape Apartments, about as far again as the Cityscape Apartments are from the saddle shop, and that Shepard is coming from that direction when seen with the arrow through his hat ... that leads me to at least entertain the idea (see the discussion of Cheyenne etc. a few weeks back) that the "Indian Fringes" refers to a definite place, and namely those streets in Edina (as well as to Mary's style of dress). I'm not making that call because it's insane. But I am saying it is fun as hell to look at. If she wants to get involved Tell her to stay in St. Paul Tell her I'm not up to taking calls But ask her for some Adderall "St. Paul" further confirms that this is Jesse [WCGT, CF], as does "Adderall" in conjunction with "Klonopins" further down. We remember that Jesse carries two kinds of pills; as described in SM it's "pick-me-uppers" and "put-me-to-sleepers"; in BCig it's "One to wake you up / One if you're nervous." Adderall is one of the former kind of pill, Klonopins one of the latter. Now Holly won't say hi to me 'Cause I'm in love with my anxiety Spectres gives us a technical definition of anxiety in the THS sense: Maybe our anxiety lives in the spaces in between who we really are and what we want to be and the things that we let other people see GoaH, which relates to this same period with the Skins, ends with a pair of lines on the same theme: But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself And in Rock Problems we already noticed Mary's impatience with the Narrator and his persistent unhappiness with the life that he's chosen. Putting these things together, it's clear what this means: "Holly" (Mary) won't talk to the Narrator, because he's too hung up on the difference between who he is and who he wants to be; like it or not, he's a hanger-on among the Skins now. If she asks just tell her that we're too far gone to deal She should know exactly how that feels If she wants a scene report, don't tell her about the kicked-in doors Tell her we ain't even keeping score no more The "kicked-in doors" could be a reference to the cops showing up at the apartment on Columbus approximately two weeks previously, but "keeping score" (after BBreathing, C&N, IHTWTDFY, etc.) is clearly a reference to the Skins' violent exploits, and "kicked-in doors" likely is too. If she wants to help the cause Tell her we need sterile gauze Tell her she should look through all her medicine And she if she's got Klonopins If Jesse wants to help, she can send sterile gauze; the Narrator and Charlemagne are frantically trying to keep Mary's stigmata from giving them away (this is where Charlemagne's "bleaching out the bloodstains" [GLS], and "keep your bandages clean" [SS], come from). Now Charlemagne don't seem the same He's skinny, scared and off his game He's been hiding from those gentlemen With the same tattoos as Gideon And the end is fun too: Just like "she don't look like that same girl we met" [FN], "girl, I've seen your friend, she looks nothing like Jada Pinkett" [SPayne], and "she just seemed distant and different" [OftC], "Charlemagne don't seem the same" turns out to be a strictly literal reference to his looking like someone else, because he's disguised as Gideon. And the last two lines are an awesome bit of misdirection: he's been hiding from those gentlemen (who are still looking for him [RH, CF]) in the last place they, or the listener, would ever think to find him, namely, *right in their midst*. Ask Her for Adderall is another favorite, and musically, too. There are a few places around the songs where Galen's basslines start channeling some kind of antigravity power, and that break before the "too far gone to deal" line never fails to hit liftoff. All right, more tomorrow. Thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl if you can, and thanks for sticking with it this far.
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