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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 4, 2018 0:12:31 GMT -5
More minor late discoveries: 1) From Stevie Nix: in the line And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after bar the bit about "after bar" isn't only a joke; it's another clue that the scene described takes place after the metal bar, that Charlemagne's in the ER (at Regions Hospital! [TMIT]) after being beaten up there. 2) In Most People Are DJs, we get this verse: They're slipping soft rock into their set list now They got some new guy that looks just like Phil Lynott We're stumbling but I think we're still in it Early on (and I'm pretty sure I wrote this upthread, way back near the beginning) I incorrectly assumed the "new guy" was Gideon, both because he was the new guy who'd been jumped into the Skins (in 1996), and because of the "soft" description (again see early posts about Gideon and hard/soft). But that was before I'd figured out what happened at the crucifixion. In fact, the "new guy" is the "new kid" of Both Crosses, who joined the Skins (in 2004, along with Charlemagne-as-Gideon, Mary-as-Holly, and Gideon himself); this is confirmed by references to "Soft Rock" (the Lifter Puller album) and Phil Lynott, marking the new guy as the musician Narrator (see references to the Narrator as "the band" in HSL and CSTLN, etc.). "We're stumbling but I think we're still in it" squares with the Narrator's just-barely-surviving experience of this period, described in detail in Ask Her For Adderall. 3) In Constructive Summer, the Narrator twice describes "me and my friends" with metaphors that are basically riddles: Me and my friends are like The drums on Lust for Life I mentioned already upthread that this refers to the Narrator and Charlemagne's 2004 reunion with Gideon after having fallen out with him ("just got back from up in Hostile, Massachusetts" [SPayne]) following the death of Holly years prior; the point of comparison is the way the two hands of the drums in Lust For Life start together, then fall out, then come back together again. What I didn't pick up on until much later was the meaning of the second one: Me and my friends are like Double whiskey coke no ice Obviously this is a reference to the D4 song, but that doesn't explain the comparison, which again is basically a riddle: - Gideon is repeatedly referred to as Jack ("Panama Jack" [HM], "Jackie Onassis" [DLME], "Ginger and Jack" [Swish]). In the last of these, the literal meaning of "Jack" is Jack Daniels whiskey, setting up a Gideon=whiskey metaphor. - Constructive Summer is set at the beginning of summer 2004, when newly reunited Charlemagne, Gideon and the Narrator are setting up their projector on top of the water tower; this is when Charlemagne has had his head shaved and put on sweatpants etc. to look like Gideon. - So "double whiskey" means double Gideon, i.e. Charlemagne together with Gideon himself as twin Gideons. - The "no ice" part is straightforward; they're off the ice (=meth) and back from the state of hostility. - Then "coke" must be, via "New Coke" ( link; remember that New Coke was the first time Coke bottles were labeled "Coke"; before that they were labeled "Coca-Cola"), a reference to the "new kid" [BCrosses] / "new guy" [MPADJs], i.e. the Narrator. Yes, in standalone usage this would totally be a stretch, but (a) "Double whiskey coke no ice" is used with a meaning that has to be explained, (b) all the other pieces of the solution are solid, and (c) holy shit did you see what he did there ...! 4) In Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night: We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen I missed this before too: "try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen" is a reference to the story of Jesus and Jairus' daughter, see for example in Luke 8:52-55: The parallel with the resurrection of Holly is obvious. I think that "your sister's in Seattle and she's sleeping with the sharps" in Entitlement Crew plays on the same comparison: packed in there we find references to - Sleepless in Seattle (muzzle spotted this) - sleeping with the fishes / swimming with the sharks (doctoracula spotted this, and is right that this must *also* be present under "sharps") - sharks=gang (Sharks and Jets (from West Side Story) references in Lifter Puller, "great white sharks" [BCamp]) - sharps=skinheads, sharps=needles where "sleeping with the fishes" means "dead" (and would, even if Holly's body hadn't been literally dumped in the river!); but implied "sleepless" means that she's not really dead after all, as in fact she is not. Here's to not being dead. Hope this is still satisfying despite the avalanche of little stuff. If you've got a minute for a prayer for Still Alive Carl, thanks.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 5, 2018 2:06:25 GMT -5
I just started to write up something about Cattle and the Creeping Things being told from Charlemagne's perspective, when I realized that I never did an overview of which songs are from which character's point of view (sometimes the point-of-view character quotes another character, but every song is from one point of view). So, for reference, the whole list:
N : Narrator (41 total) Ch : Charlemagne (24 total) M : Mary (5 total) J : Jesse (5 total) H : Holly (3 total) G : Gideon (3 total) * : other + : reporting a character's perspective, but told in the 3rd person
A few of these could go one way or another. There's a lot of information in the ones marked "other" that's relevant to the story, and the dividing line is pretty subjective; you could argue that Spectres is told from the point of view of the Narrator, for example, but I don't think it's an airtight case. Is Oaks really the Narrator? Maybe not, but I tend to think so. I might have missed some of the + told-in-the-third-person ones, but those are usually only halfway in 3rd person anyway: One For The Cutters is explicit about shifting directly into Mary's thoughts, but Spinners doesn't mark the transition out of description of Jesse into Jesse's own recollection of Mary's advice. Most of the list is solid, in any case.
N Positive Jam H The Swish N Barfruit Blues N Most People Are DJs Ch Certain Songs G Knuckles N Hostile, Mass. N Sketchy Metal N Sweet Payne Ch Killer Parties
M Milkcrate Mosh Ch Hot Fries M Curves and Nerves Ch Modesto Is Not That Sweet N You Gotta Dance
Ch Hornets! Hornets! Ch Cattle And The Creeping Things Ch Your Little Hoodrat Friend N Banging Camp N Charlemagne In Sweatpants H Stevie Nix Ch Multitude Of Casualties Ch Don't Let Me Explode N Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night N Crucifixion Cruise N How A Resurrection Really Feels
J 212 Margarita
N Stuck Between Stations Ch Chips Ahoy! Ch Hot Soft Light H Same Kooks N First Night N Party Pit * You Can Make Him Like You N Massive Nights Ch Citrus * Chillout Tent Ch Southtown Girls
* For Boston N Girls Like Status Ch Arms And Hearts N Teenage Liberation
N Constructive Summer N Sequestered In Memphis M+ One For The Cutters Ch Navy Sheets N Lord I'm Discouraged M Yeah Sapphire Ch Both Crosses N Stay Positive Ch Magazines J+ Joke About Jamaica N Slapped Actress
N Ask Her For Adderall M Cheyenne Sunrise * Two Handed Handshake J+ 40 Bucks * Spectres
N The Sweet Part Of The City * Soft In The Center Ch The Weekenders Ch The Smidge N Rock Problems Ch We Can Get Together Ch Hurricane J N Barely Breathing N Our Whole Lives G A Slight Discomfort
* Touchless Ch Ascension Blues N Going On A Hike * Separate Vacations J Criminal Fingers
N I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You J+ Spinners N The Only Thing N The Ambassador Ch On With The Business Ch Big Cig N Wait A While G Runner's High N Almost Everything N Oaks
N Records And Tapes N Saddle Shoes N Look Alive
N The Most Important Thing
N Entitlement Crew N Snake In The Shower
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 5, 2018 2:12:36 GMT -5
Still more minor stuff that I never got around to or didn't notice until late: 1) While putting together the point-of-view list, I remembered something I'd said upthread, guessing that the release of Heaven Is Whenever marked the point at which there was enough information about the story to put it all together. At the time I know I was thinking about Ascension Blues in particular, because it was listening to the lines "He came onto the court; and he knelt before the sword / There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board" that made the whole crucifixion scene come together, with connected lines from Navy Sheets ("new device" / "opening night") and then Slapped Actress ("fake fights") filling out the picture (pretty sure I described this in detail upthread too, so I'll leave it at that). But as I thought about that more over time, I realized that I had forgotten some crucial contributions from after the Heaven Is Whenever era, without which I suspect it would have been very hard to make progress. Specifically: - the stuff in Records And Tapes about "the kid with the cape" and "I think I know how he did that." Those lines, from the very end of the last song of the Teeth Dreams era, opened the door to recognizing Gideon in the "you ... with a long black shawl" of Stevie Nix, which in turn led to a ton of other discoveries. Hard to say how far I would have got without that, and without the "this can't be a coincidence" feedback loop that went with it, so early on. - the lines in Almost Everything: "With the lambs from my dreams looking up at your hands / And your hands pointing up at the lights." If I'm not mistaken those are the only lines in the whole catalog that suggest that the hands and the bleeding and the wrapped-up wrists are about something other than injury or suicidal tendencies; without them I don't know that I would have picked up on Mary's stigmata, and without that I'm not sure how much farther I would have got with the rest of the story of which she is the center. In short, I'm inclined to correct myself and say that the whole catalog up through and including Teeth Dreams was required in order to put the story together, at least for me. 2) CatCT is told from Charlemagne's perspective, and while it's not a big revelation or anything I don't think I ever did anything with the last verse: It seemed like a simple place to score And it seemed like a simple place to score It seemed like a simple place to score and then some old lady came to the door And said Mackenzie Phillips doesn't live here anymore Charlemagne's "It seemed like a simple place to score" refers to the Twin Cities, where he and Holly originally came in the belief that it was an easy place for them to make it to the big time (and for "simple" see the things written upthread about "Cheyenne" too). But it wasn't quite that simple. The last two lines describe Charlemagne going to look for Holly at the new house where she's gone to live after returning from California, and learning from the landlady that she's disappeared (as foreshadowed by the allusion to all the four horsemen of the Apocalypse except Death, and "murder is for murderers," earlier in the song). In short, that's how he learns that she's gone, having been killed by Gideon. 3) The line about Mackenzie Phillips reminds me of something very cool, namely, that all of the characters' references to people in pop culture (like their references to princess phones, message machines, computers, etc.) are date-appropriate. Examples: - Mackenzie Phillips' drug problems (the basis for the landlady's using the name to refer to Holly) date from 1977-92; the landlady makes this quip in 1996, a few years after Phillips entered rehab in 1992. - Elliot Smith's first two albums, including the self-titled "Elliot Smith" with a lot of explicit mention of drug dependency, came out in 1994 and 1995; Charlemagne's reproach to Holly, "Elliot Smith seems like a mess to me" [HF], dates to July 1996. (Smith died in 2003, making that a latest possible date for Charlemagne's line, too.) - Jada Pinkett played the role of the "insufferably snooty" Lauren, the main character's love interest, in the 1994 film The Inkwell (link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inkwell). I haven't seen many Pinkett films, but this one, one of a half-dozen before her 1997 marriage and change of name to Pinkett Smith, seems to be the one underlying Jesse and the Narrator's comparison of "princess" Mary [C&N, ASD, A&H] to "Jada Pinkett" [SPayne] in 2004. 4) I don't think I ever did anything with the last two lines in Southtown Girls: Meet me right in front of the Party City, that two-sided tape it gets way too sticky I got a bad case of noisemaker blues Obviously both "two-sided tape" (for wrapping presents) and "noisemaker" are mentioned in connection with the Party City party supply store; but the references are both to the troubles of Charlemagne, from whose perspective the song is told: - the "sticky" aspect of the "two-sided tape" refers to being "stuck between" Holly on the one hand and Mary on the other; Charlemagne's suspension between the two of them is both the background to the situation of Southtown Girls itself and to the line "stuck between stations" later on. - "noisemaker" is another reference to Holly --- whose preference is for getting high and awkward silences --- unnaturally making noise when fucking her clients (including Gideon): "you on the streets with a tendency to preach to the choir, wired for sound and down with whatever" [CatCT], "banging" [BCamp], "she said that she was coming but she mostly just made hard fast noises" [GLS], etc. It's late, gotta sleep. Thank you for reading along, and if you've got a moment, thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 5, 2018 22:40:11 GMT -5
More minor things:
1) When talking about Holly making noise for clients:
- "noisemaker" [SG] - "you on the streets with a tendency to preach to the choir, wired for sound and down with whatever" [CatCT] - "banging" [BCamp] - "she said that she was coming but she mostly just made hard fast noises" [GLS]
I should have included her hoping-for-a-prescription blowjob offer to Charlemagne (in Gideon's body, in the car), from Crucifixion Cruise:
And talking loud over lousy connections, she put her mouth around a difficult question
and the following reference to the same episode, from Multitude of Casualties:
We were hoping for an action adventure Or something loud that we could feel through all the Feminax
2) I mentioned that the early-demo-Chillout-Tent line
He was a once and future member of the Cityscape Skins
describes Gideon leaving the Skins and rejoining them 7 years later; but that's not the only THS line alluding to his re-entry. In You Gotta Dance, the lines
Say a prayer for the Cityscape Skins Half are getting sprung and half are going back in
are ambiguous: on the one hand they seem to refer to prison (see Shepard and St. Cloud [IHTWTDFY]), but the proto-CTent line above makes them more likely to refer to the gang itself, so that "sprung" means leaving or escaping from the gang, and "going back in" means returning to it, like Gideon did. On this note, the opening verse of IHTWTDFY, coming from the Narrator's point of view, deserves a closer look:
I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again Heard they finally got some discipline Running up the score and stocking up like it's World War IV I heard that some are getting sprung and some are back in You know it's always back and forth And most of them are dead And some don't even live here anymore
The theme of "always back and forth" comes in for a degree of emphasis here that doesn't really make sense as a literal description of intermittent imprisonment. Even with the covering explanation that "Shepard came out of St. Cloud," we're still being invited to look at this more closely. With Gideon's once-and-future gang membership established as a regular theme in its own right, we have another reading for "sprung" and "back in" that could offer an alternative. But that *still* doesn't really make sense: that's just a single example, and one from a long time in the past, too. What's the *present* emphasis on "always back and forth" for?
The answer is in the next two lines: "most of them are dead" refers, in fact, to Gideon; but "some don't even live here anymore" refers to the Narrator himself.
For two terrifying weeks in 2004 the Narrator, too, was the "new kid" [BCrosses] in the Skins; see the timeline and the writeup on AHfA, LA, etc. above. He thought he had left these things behind when he moved away (see "I'd already moved out to New York City" [CSTLN] and "when I brought you back here for Christmas" [IHTWTDFY]), but it's still here, and suddenly he's part of it again.
On the surface, the song presents as the story of a guy with some sketchy friends trying to reassure a frightened girlfriend; but digging into it now we see what's really going on. "For me, it was mostly the music / A crew to go to the shows with" is a lie; he entered their world because of Mary, and became part of it only because he followed her through it, all the way to the end. And the traumatic memories associated with Mary are front and center here: the song opens with "the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again," Sweet Payne's description of the whole gang fucking her, ecstatic and willing. It's not his girlfriend who's terrified, it's *he* who's terrified. When he ends by saying "you tapped me on the arm like you wanted to cruise," we remember that "cruise" in the THS universe means picking up tricks [CC, GLS, demo GLS, CTent, and even Lifter Puller's Cruised And Accused Of Cruising], and we understand what's really on his mind.
This is such great writing, with so much left to unpack, even now.
More tomorrow, I think. Any and all prayers for Still Alive Carl still gratefully received.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 7, 2018 0:28:00 GMT -5
Still more minor things:
1) Another cool thing that Craig sometimes does when fleshing out a picture is to casually throw out a couple of examples (usually two for balance) that appear to be casual details of whatever he's describing, but in fact are cleverly repackaged allusions to something else in the story.
The main example of this that always comes to mind are Holly's movies in Curves and Nerves; I talked about this in detail way upthread, but in short
She did a movie called North Dallas Foursome. There was agony and ecstasy and the cheerleaders got gruesome.
is an allusion to the metal bar beatdown, while She did a movie called Revenge Of The Pervs. There were screams and jeans and curves and nerves.
is an allusion to the reservoir crucifixion.
There's another example of this that I hadn't noticed in Massive Nights.
Like so many other song titles, "Massive Nights" has a double meaning: "Massive" doesn't only mean big, it means characterized by the sacrament of Mass; and it's nights, plural, because the sacramental events of prom night which are the immediate subject of the song are backlit by the events of the night of the crucifixion which Mary is experiencing in her vision (see the detailed discussion of YGD/MN/OWL upthread) at the same time. In that context,
And there weren't any fights There's usually one or two Some guys they get a little bit uptight Some girls they got something to prove
looks an awful lot like it, too, is referring ambiguously to the night of the crucifixion:
- The crucifixion night also had one fight, or two, depending on whether you count the stabbing of Charlemagne's Ghost and the stabbing of Charlemagne's actual body (Gideon's suicide) as one fight or two. - The term "uptight" is used in just one other place, in reference to Charlemagne at night under the spotlight [CiS]; which itself foreshadows his crucifixion-night appearance under the light of the projector (the subject of Mary's vision). - I think "some girls they got something to prove" refers to Mary, disguised as Holly, testifying to the identity of Charlemagne's Ghost with her Judas kiss in front of the partying Skins. (It *could* also refer to her taking the stand later to prove Charlemagne's innocence, but I think the former reading is tighter.)
There are other paired descriptions in Massive Nights that provide more than just casual color:
The guys were feeling good about their liquor run The girls were kinda flirting with the setting sun
The "guys ... feeling good about their liquor run" is a specific allusion to the Narrator stopping to get alcohol before the prom: "Praying that they're cool when I come pick up the package ... Stop by the shop and get a bottle to go" [OWL].
In the light of other paired allusions, the explicit referent for the liquor run makes it hard to avoid concluding that "the girls were kinda flirting with the setting sun" refers to Mary. This is a pretty packed line:
- On the one hand, "setting sun" is literal; OWL explicitly takes us from the early 5:30 mass through nighttime, and MN covers the same timeframe. - As the night progresses and the kids get high, Mary starts "going off to the dial tone"; "talking about that boy back home" etc. lets us know that she's getting sucked into her St. Theresa vision of crucified Charlemagne, in which she blows him (lots more detail about all of this upthread, just summarizing for context here). So "kinda flirting with" appears as a classic instance of Finn ellipsis, meaning "going down on" (compare "pretty much crashing there" [Ambassador], or "kinda kicking it again" [SPayne], or "kinda saving myself for the scene" [YLHF]), while "setting sun" parses as "setting [i.e., dying] Son" (compare references to the "Son" in SM and GoaH and to the "Trinity" in A&H). - A possible third angle on this line is that all the episodes of Mary's vision that we definitely know about happen after dark, and even the ones that aren't specifically situated seem to have a nighttime context.
Here is a full list (I think --- doing this off the cuff, so might be forgetting something) of the episodes of her visions, all at night: - the one during prom ("the first night" [OWL], "massive nights" [MN]) - the one during the metal bar beatdown ("some nights" [SPayne]) - the one *after* the crucifixion ("now she's 4am and she's wide awake" [BCrosses]) - the one shortly before the metal bar ("I bet your next party gets sketchy / I saw the new kids nodding off" [CSunrise]; she's been partying all night and comes home to clean up her bleeding stigmata at "sunrise"). - "she got screwed up by her vision / it was scary when she saw him" [SN]; a generic reference, but the following line about the camps/paths along the river suggests that this happened in the Party Pit, where the parties went late into the night ("last hour of the party" [SN], "tonight" plus the sound of the junebugs [ASD])
2) Following up on yesterday's post about IHTWTDFY and on "some girls they got something to prove" above:
There are three expressions used to describe the Skins in IHTWTDFY that are a little opaque when taken literally, but as allusions to something else ring major bells. Shepard is described as coming out of St. Cloud with "a little ideology, a new way of thinking, man" ---
A view to the future Jesus ...
Craig worked pretty hard to set that up, but when highlighted it's hard not to see the reference to Mary. Also
I know what they said, I don't know if it's true
is exactly the problem that the Narrator ("That's how I know when you're lying" [CiS]) and Charlemagne ("In the end only the girls know the whole truth" [Weekenders]) have with Mary after it's all over; they're radically unsure, in retrospect, whether the things they've heard from her are true or not. And finally,
They never care if it's true As long as they got something to prove And they always got something to prove
has exactly the one echo in "some girls they got something to prove" [MN], which again looks like a reference to Mary, running with the Skins as Holly, putting the finger on Charlemagne's Ghost.
So in talking about the Skins, it seems that the Narrator is having traumatic flashbacks not just to his own brief membership in the gang ("and some don't even live here anymore"), but to Mary's as well, who for the rest is the real reference point of his terror. Come to think of it, this is exactly like Charlemagne having a talk with Jesse, but thinking of Holly; the Narrator is having a talk with the girl he brought back for Christmas, but he's thinking of Mary all along. When he says "I hope this whole thing didn't frighten you," what he means is "Did you look at his shoes? Did you look at their teeth? Please tell me this thing fucking frightened you."
I keep sitting down to write a couple of paragraphs and end up with a research paper, but it is what it is, there's a lot of fine work to unpack. Hope it's good reading anyway. Thanks for following along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 7, 2018 23:32:05 GMT -5
More scattered stuff:
1) I've got a pile of scribbled notes from hearing things here and there, and keep finding bits I should have added in earlier writeups. Another weather reference I forgot to mention is
Wandered out of Mass one day and faded into the fog and love and faithless fear [HM]
and of course
Lost in fog and love and faithless fear [Citrus]
both referring to Charlemagne and Holly in the car after the crucifixion; the "fog" is, again, Holly's storm of meth addiction.
2) There's another paired line from Massive Nights
Everyone was funny and everyone was pretty
where the pair-pattern running through the song suggests that it's the Narrator who's funny and Mary who's pretty. This fits the thing we saw in Jester and June and elsewhere --- jokes/laughing as a characteristic of early happiness in a still innocent relationship, with points of comparison in HM, GLS, TL, SM, JaJ. Like Jester and June, the Narrator made jokes, Mary laughed.
3) Speaking of the progression from innocent beginnings to darker things, there are probably a dozen different framings of this contrast, from "We used to want it all, now we just want a little bit" [Smidge] to "left home virgins, came back vampires" [NS]; another is the first night / last night theme, which gets used in a few places besides First Night itself. A couple of notes on this:
"first night" [HH] refers to the first night Charlemagne met Holly, in Lynn, MA "first night" [FN] refers to Holly's first night in the Twin Cities, as described in Swish and Barfruit Blues "first night" [OWL] refers to the Narrator's first (and only?) date & sex with Mary, on prom night "first night" [OftC] refers to Mary and Charlemagne finally getting together in the back of the car after the crucifixion; the innocent sense of the expression is deliberately used to set off a deeply fucked-up situation
Most of the uses of "last night" in the songs aren't contrasted directly with "first night" like in FN, and don't have any special sense otherwise. But there are still two that have an interesting emphasis:
"last night" [Swish] and "first night" [FN] are the same night, and maybe that's deliberate. "last night" in "that last night he had total retention" [SBS] turns into a really tough nut when held up to the light of Craig's mention of Berryman's "last night on earth" in his discussion of Stuck Between Stations (interview linked somewhere upthread); if "last night" means "last night on earth," how can anything about it be retained afterward? The solution is what we now know, that while Charlemagne's body dies that night, his soul lives on in Gideon's body. But it's a hell of a puzzle until you get to that point.
4) Can't remember if I've said this explicitly but it's in my pile of notes, so maybe not: the 212 in 212-Margarita originates with Jesse on the one hand, and Gideon on the other. With all the changing places it's complicated, but it works like this:
On the second and last day of the trial apparently-Mary (really Holly in Mary's body, but she's appearing as Mary again, with turtleneck sweater, family lawyers, etc. [OftC]) takes the stand to provide an alibi to apparently-Gideon (really Charlemagne in Gideon's body), delivering him from the rap for the murder of Charlemagne.
Outside the courthouse, Jesse accosts apparently-Mary, trying to find out what happened to Charlemagne, if Gideon didn't kill him. Apparently-Mary doesn't have any answers ("she put her hand up on my shoulder and then she just kinda stood there" [212M]); but she offers Jesse both sympathy and advice.
The advice she offers in 212-Margarita is to leave the Twin Cities to go to New York and be in magazines, just like she's always wanted to do [SM, Magazines, CF], and try to fall in love again there (we know from Spinners that she takes this advice to heart). So the 212 originates with Jesse in the sense of the advice to "go to New York finally, drink some margaritas, and fall in love again."
The actual suggestion "go to New York" isn't explicitly recorded anywhere, but we can infer that it was made, both because the rest of the advice ("you gotta get back out there" along with the drink and fall in love stuff [212M, Spinners]) *is* recorded, and because the offer of sympathy explicitly includes the suggestion that she, apparently-Mary, will visit New York --- that she will be reachable at a 212 phone number --- and they can get together there when she does:
She said, "Call me 212-Margarita. 'Cause I'm green, and I'm misleading, and I've had too much tequila. Leave a message at the Motel 6, and let me know if you still feel sick. You know I'll be in town on a three night stick, and maybe if you're feeling better then maybe we could get some soup together, we've been sick together before."
Why will she be in New York, at a 212 number? The premise of the alibi she's just provided --- "if she says we partied, then I'm pretty sure we partied" [KP] --- is that Mary and Gideon have gotten back together (after having previously been an item from 1989-1996, see calendar). What apparently-Mary is telling Jesse is that she's going to accompany apparently-Gideon as he continues his Skins lifestyle of dealing and driving between the motels and the malls (which he'd resumed in the two weeks that they rejoined the gang, see GoaH, SShoes).
They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls [SN] He's got the pages in his pockets that he ripped out of the Bible from his bed stand in the motel [CatCT] Gideon makes love to the suites [FN] Gideon makes love in the suites [FN demo on BAGIA reissue: confirms that the FN line is a reference to motels with Holly] A couple motels and a couple saloons / They can eat a couple of weeks up [GoaH]
(The irony of her saying this is that apparently-Mary is really Holly, who lived this life with Gideon before and wants very much to go back to it [CC, NS, etc.]; only she can't, because Gideon is dead.)
In short, per the story she's telling Jesse, apparently-Mary will be driving around with apparently-Gideon, and they'll go to New York because that's where Osseo-townie-Gideon has always wanted to go:
Hey New York City, I love it when you turn on your lights [ASD] Hi, I like to party on the problem blocks [BCamp] He says, Not me baby, / I grew up in the city / let me have the creeps the cops and the rock [BCamp liner notes] Small town cops are like swarms of flies [CatCT; again, Gideon pretending to be a big city guy, dissing the townie life]
So 212 comes from Gideon as well.
5) Speaking of apparently-Mary giving advice to Jesse, we hear about that advice in a little more detail in Spinners. It's more than just "go to 212, drink some margaritas and fall in love again" --- that's there, but there's more:
Never let them tie you up It's a big city, there's a lot of love. Salted rims and frosted mugs. You gotta get back out there. ... Once you're out there everything is possible. There might be a fight. There might be a miracle. Loosen your grip, it feels so incredible. Let the city live your life for you tonight.
The additional stuff starts with "Never let them tie you up"; it begins by telling her, don't get tied up in one guy, move on from Charlemagne, there's other fish in the sea. But it doesn't stop there, and it emphatically doesn't say "you'll find someone else," which is what Jesse wants, or would want if she could have someone else to be for her what Charlemagne was.
No, the advice to *never* let them tie you up ends up taking on a life of its own, and by the second of the above verses she's stopped talking about love entirely and moved on to something very different. "Loosen your grip, it feels so incredible"; this is Holly talking, Holly who never really cared about love as long as she could get high [HH, BBlues, CiS, BCamp, YLHF, etc.], breaking character to say what she's really enthusiastic about. The Jesse we hear about in Joke About Jamaica has boxed herself into a bad place pretty much on her own, but the fact that this advice is what she keeps coming back to doesn't seem likely to have helped, either.
Thanks for remembering to pray for Still Alive Carl if you can do that. More tomorrow.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 8, 2018 14:38:59 GMT -5
Not really much to comment on here, besides how this makes it even clearer to me that Craig's lyrics can be enjoyed on so many levels. I really like how you flesh out the clusters of metaphors (or what you would call it), and also how recurring motifs keep popping up to allude the same (or the two same) thing(s).
Reading about when in the real world timeline you would have been able to flesh out the story, I came to think about how Craig described the different records upon release. Not important in itself, but I seem to remember Craig said in more than one interview that Stay Positive was a record where he wanted to "make the waters a little murkier". And I'm quite sure that Heaven Is Whenever multiple times was described as a record where Hold Steady tried to "age gracefully". At least that last description seems fitting to some of the narrative stuff. Both in the Mary-full-of-grace way, but also as a sort of metaphor on what Mary goes through. You could argue that her way to act on her visions, to sort of grow up or act her age, isn't all that graceful, but it seems like a decent try. Teeth Dreams seems to have been labeled as a record about anxiety. I know you've been through that Spectres line a lot.
Keep on posting! It's always a pleasure to come back in here and catch up. I'll keep on thinking about Stay Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 8, 2018 23:19:36 GMT -5
Hey man! Yeah, I'm kind of cleaning out the drawers here ... nothing as dramatic as putting the whole story together, unfortunately, but there are still little monuments to craft left in the corners that are really satisfying. And in writing things down I'm hoping to come across more that I've missed. Yeah, it's pretty incredible how the individual albums reflect such different states of mind like that. Even allowing for the fact that the crazy party episodes of the story have more or less all been told by the time BAGIA is over (except for Ask Her For Adderall, which is SP-era right?), it's hard not to wonder if that's not a purely arbitrary choice on Craig's part --- if, after that point, he didn't just choose windows on the story that fit where he felt himself to be at later times, and made it all work, instead of being constrained by a particular approach to the holes that were left to be filled. And some of that changing viewpoint does seem to rub off on the story, I mean on the plot itself. I can see "aging gracefully" in Weekenders for sure, and We Can Get Together, for example. But it's even weirdly there in A Slight Discomfort, which is super early chronologically speaking --- yes, this is Gideon's voice before he lost his mind, so it isn't strange that it seems superficially more graceful; but apart from that, what we see of him there as a kid sheds a lot of light on how he ended his life many years later. And the "anxiety" theme seems to be read into the story from quite a late point (starting with Ask Her For Adderall, now that I think about it), like it was introduced from the outside. It's a lot easier to comment on the concrete specifics of what's been written than it is to guess about how the writing happened, but probably those are not two independent things. Anyway, I do want to try to get through the rest of the notes, there's not too much left, then maybe take a crack at Entitlement Crew and Snake In The Shower. What you wrote there about the album descriptions feeds into something else you and I talked about earlier, that I wanted to chase down properly and add to the thread ... There's a youtube interview of Craig with G.E. Smith, where (starting at around 30 seconds in, link) he talks about Clear Heart Full Eyes: There are a few things here that really surprised me. First, the fact that he pays attention to the way his initials map into the title is kind of insane, that's a level of composition or whatever you want to call it that I really hadn't expected. I don't know how anyone from the outside could reliably follow this kind of technique, either, although I guess it makes me pretty confident that his alterations of individual letters --- like Nix for Nicks and phillies for fillies, for example --- is deliberate. Second, this explanation makes it pretty clear that the title of the album involves another one of those awesome triangulation things to an "off-screen" meaning that Craig sometimes does, for example - in The Swish, where the emphasis and internal rhyme point to a meaning that is implied at the end of the song, but was only made explicit in certain live recordings: *block*buster summer *blood*sucking summer --> [cocksucking summer] - in Banging Camp, where the joke referred to in the first half of the line explains the significance of the second as well: grew up in denial [Denial: It's Not a River in Egypt] went to school in Massachusetts --> [Massachusetts: it's not a State in New England] - in Milkcrate Mosh, where the mapping of city names to the artists who wrote the songs paired with the cities points to the missing word as the real meaning of "Denver": [John] Denver (slums) : Rocky Mountain --> [High] [Buffalo] Springfield (slums) : Sugar Mountain Here, the implication of reversing Clear Eyes / Full Hearts to Clear Heart / Full Eyes is that the remaining line, Can't Lose, is also reversed: Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, Can't Lose Clear Heart, Full Eyes --> [Lose] I'm not saying Craig is trolling with the stuff about "positivity, optimism and hope, even with age and ongoing experience"; rather, I think he's hiding the conclusion that honesty about experience often means seeing that you're going to lose. All right, let me stop there for tonight. Thanks for reading along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl. I'll try to put a solid dent in the remaining notes tomorrow.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 9, 2018 15:30:23 GMT -5
Funny you should bring up Clear Heart Full Eyes. I went back to it for the first time in ages this morning. I've always liked it, but also always sort of dismissed it as an album where Craig was trying to find his solo voice, and looking really unsure about himself in the process. I feel like he's holding something back. Mostly musically - the songs are good, sometimes great, but they're played (and produced) in a subdued way, with the guitars way back in the mix and Craig sound deliberately soft, almost reserved. I don't know if that makes any sense, but the impression still stands. I've always thought that this applies to the lyrics as well. They're by no means weak, but they also seem a bit reserved, and I get the feeling that Craig wrote them with a lighter pen, sometimes choosing the easier or the not-so-deep way of writing out things. Like, the characters are well built as always, but they seem a little bit more stereotypical, a little more caricated, not that complex. And some of the playing with words (Honoluu Blues is one example) seems more like just that - playing around with words - than offering a deeper understanding of anything.
All this may sound a bit harsh, because I really like the album. It just feels a little lighter and more pale compared to the growingly confident follow ups. And I write all this to get to what I got out of the debut today - the first time I heard the entire album after this thread. And that made me see some of the lyrics in a new light.
Since you already have touched into the solo stuff, and otherwise tie up some minor (your phrasing, not mine!) stuff, I figured I might as well put these random thoughts here.
NO FUTURE There's a lot of stuff I don't get here. But I get enough to be pretty certain that this entire lyric is pretty tight connected to the THS narrative - or at least playing around knowingly with the same images, motifs and metaphors. First, you get the "died on the inside"/"alive on the outside" thing, which obviously links up well with both Mary/Holly and Gideon/Charlemagne. Secondly, it can't be a coincidence that the narrator in this song takes his advices from Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten - two of the nicknames Gideon try to apply to himself in Knuckles. And on top of that, we get clear references to crucifixion, gushing blood and "if you can't beat them, join them" thing who sounds a lot like going undercover in the Skins to me. Lots of lingo here corresponds really well with Hold Steady stuff. I would go so far as saying that the narrator in this song, must be a character from the narrative. I'm not that good in getting everything together, and I don't get it to add up with the dead/alive-inside/outside thing, but a lot of this sounds like Charlemagne to me.
JACKSON This might be thin stuff, but after this amazing thread, I keep hearing things I usually didn't hear. I guess there's a risk to become too aware, and seeing connections that aren't what they appear to be, but we're in the closing hours of the story, so I might as well bring it up. So: Jack = Gideon. Jesus, the son = Charlemagne. It's not THAT far fetched to read the character Jackson as a merge between the two. In other words, Charlemagne in Gideon's body, after the crucifixion. The song clearly describes something that sounds like someone fleeing something. Which doesn't make it THAT far fetched to thin that these three characters - the narrator, Jackson and Stephanie - are the three people in the car, speeding away from the crucifixion. You guys can read the full lyric yourself, but there are plenty of things here who hints in this direction. You probably see these things right away, but: Jackson was an actor, a time when it didn't seem that crowded (as things later seemed, with the double two-in-one personas, see CatCT), there sharks and harbours and sailors, a memory of the "back of the theatre" (AE, BC) Kansas gets a rare mention (remember RH) - and all those questions about what happened to Jackson, echoes the "ask about Charlemagne" trope.
TERRIFIED EYES This seems like a much more stand alone story than No Future and Jackson (who I genuinely feel could go straight into the narrative songs), but there's a few interesting things here. To start with the last one: The last lines of the song perfectly mirrors the chours in SiM. There you get barlight/allright and daylight/desperate. Here it is middle of the day/OK and night time/terrified. It's just turned upside down. It's also hard to overhear the "pissed at the doctors but mostly just sick of not connecting". To me this sounds awful lot like The Narrator worrying about Holly-as-Mary lying in the hospital (I could be mistaken, but this is what happens in both FN and TMI, right?), but what worries him the most is not getting through to the real Mary deep inside. I also hear the "It's obvious to anyone..." part, where we get to see the "she" in the song crossing herself before "the bartender's round", as The Narrator getting convinced that the Mary-looking person he sees in front of him, really has became Holly. Lots of stuff here that doesn't correspond that well, and my readings might be a stretch, but there's enough interesting lines here to examine from a The Narrator/Mary perspective.
RENTED ROOM Again, I'm not able to pinpoint the right references to tell if this could be a part of the narrative or not. At surface, it seems like a pretty straight up breakup/divorce song. But with the narrative in mind, this could be a song from one of the two persons losing someone for good that night at The Party Pit. The Narrator lost Mary, and Jesse lost Charlemagne. A couple of the phrasings here suggest The Narrator/Mary. The "drink and sit" (AE) and the dancing (lots of songs). Then again, it's Jesse who loves the songs she's born into, and adores good old rock'n'roll. And the "started coming here two years ago" is strangely specific, and echoes "two years off some prairie town" from Spinners. The narrator in the song sings about a "she" later on, but I guess there could be some shifts of perspective here. Or just a few of the lines or verses connected to the narrative. Or maybe there's nothing here at all, just Craig using Craig-y words in a song. I'll just leave it there.
BALCONY This is certainly a stretch, but try to read it as The Narrator coming down to St. Paul to see how Mary is getting tight with the Skins, taking the bus back uptown (to Hennepin?) disheartened and saddened by how she's slipping away from him. There's an echo of "your laugh leave laugh lines, your love leaves bright bruises" here as well. Again, a thousand things who don't add up, but for what it's worth, it's some familiar images here.
I don't want to go as far as saying that these lyrics is a part of the narrative, but there's lots of stuff here who seems way more connected to THS than some of the material on the last two solo albums. And for what it's worth, these songs was written an released not long after Heaven Is Whenever, and way before Teeth Dreams - so in a real life timeline, Craig obviously wasn't done with the narrative stuff.
This is just some left hand readings, but I figured you (as in skepticatfirst) could have a dig at this if you find it interesting!
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 9, 2018 23:16:21 GMT -5
This is really good stuff, man. You're digging at something that's a challenge for me, too, because I don't want to go too far into reading an order from one set of songs into another where it doesn't exist, but at the same time there clearly are hints of something in common. Here's where I think I am on this, more or less: - The most likely account of the similarities would seem to be that the stories are completely separate, but that many pieces out of which they are built --- the terms, the metaphors, the themes --- come in for a lot of reuse. This is a pretty conservative position, and I don't think it's too difficult to defend it. (But read on.) - I think pretty much the same thing about the non-story THS songs, like Chillout Tent or You Can Make Him Like You, for example. Chillout Tent has a pile of terms in it that are really valuable for understanding the other songs ("pinned" / "baby bird" / "cruise" / "kicked it" etc.). YCMHLY is full of themes that are closely related to the story of Holly and Gideon and shed light on it. - When I first read through the lyrics of Craig's solo albums, I didn't see nearly as much as you've seen here, but that was during the summer. After the last few weeks carefully working through minor themes and metaphors, I had a look at Preludes and suddenly saw all kinds of connections that I hadn't seen before. That doesn't have to be a conspiracy theory thing or whatever; Craig has obviously invested a lot in these stories, and there are probably a lot of parts of them that can stand alone in new and different contexts. But I'm with you that it's worth taking a closer look for anything that might bear on the THS universe --- I admit that, for me, that would be a bigger than average payoff. Just looking briefly at some of the stuff you bring up here, - "died on the inside"/"alive on the outside" : I had missed this before because at first blush it just sounds like an expression, but of course you're right; over and over we've seen that this kind of emphatic repetition calls for closer attention. And the other stuff in the song is front and center. - I would have agreed that the Jackson stuff is a bit thin, but now that I've read the Lifter Puller lyrics and know that "Sangre de Stephanie" is a thing --- another bleeding, or anyway bloody, female character --- the continuity of "Jackson and Stephanie" and a narrator with other stories seems like a possibility that has to be taken seriously. And then there's the "acting" stuff from THS, rehearsing in the theater, roles we chose to play, make our own movies, etc., maybe connecting with Jackson the actor. - "pissed at the doctors but mostly just sick of not connecting": yeah, "connecting" is really a loaded word and, now that you call it to my attention, makes me, too, think of First Night and Almost Everything ("remember the sessions / how we made a connection"). - that "two years ago" line is intriguing, another one I missed but exactly the sort of thing that seems to bear closer examination the more I spend time with the "minor" stuff. I have to admit that starting fresh with either the Lifter Puller lyrics or the solo stuff seems like a really daunting, colossal task, now that I know just how complex the THS story turned out to be; and that goes double for trying to keep up with it as kind of a daily thing. So I'm not sure I can handle a thorough look at either, which is what would be wanted, any time soon. But let me try to slip in a look at No Future and Jackson, maybe, to see if any major aha leaps out. And in the meantime, let me try to finish up with the THS items already on my plate. More minor stuff, some of it with bearing on Entitlement Crew and Snake In The Shower: 1) Another theme in the trying-to-make-the-big-time disappointment story is "making plans": - That's not how he planned it [BBlues] (about Gideon) - He didn't really fit the plans she made [C&N] (about Holly) - Years spent faking pain and making plans [Ambassador] (about Charlemagne) None of these are particular plans; it's making plans in general that's being punctured. When held up alongside generic ideas of success like the California "make it" ideal [DLME etc.], "I wanted this to be our year" in On With The Business, the identification of this goal as an "American Business" [OwtB], and of course the fact that these plans are always disappointed, this dismissive take on plans makes me inclined to think that "American Ruse" in Entitlement Crew is a reference to the same false idea of success. That's a bit thin, but there's enough of a pattern there to make it a reasonable guess. 2) There are a bunch of places in the THS story where rainbow colors are contrasted with black and tan or black and white: - Had a moment in the middle of In Color and In Black & White [RP] - Meet me right in front of the Rainbow Foods, I got a brown paper bag and black buckle shoes [SG] - There was a kid on the corner with a coat of many colors [SitS] and for black and tan / black and white only, without the color contrast: - great white sharks / big black cars / black and tans [BCamp] - long black shawl / white swan [SN] So what's the meaning of this? It seems that there's a regular theme here of dealers appearing outwardly with many colors [SG, SitS], but also having some black and tan or black and white appearance as well. The SG dealer both appears in front of the Rainbow Foods, and has the black shoes / brown bag that mark him as a member of the metaphorically Black-and-Tan Skins gang. A Gideon-like character appears in SitS with a Joseph-like code of my colors, but Gideon also shows up at Holly's party with the black shawl and white swan [SN], and the "great white sharks / big black cars / black and tans" of BCamp are lines in imitation of Gideon as well. The best explanation that I can come up with is to take the Rock Problems reference to the Cheap Trick album as the key to the metaphor: as Wikipedia explains ( link): If you look at the cover art, Zander and Petersson look like glamorous rock stars in color, whereas Carlos and Nielsen, in black and white, look anything but. So I'm inclined to read this as another expectation/delusion or innocence/experience metaphor, this time of the alluring image of the dealers' party world versus the much uglier reality of gangs, violence and self-destruction underlying it. Let me wrap it up there for tonight. Thanks for continuing to read along with this stuff, and thank you for thinking of Still Alive Carl. More again tomorrow.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 10, 2018 6:15:21 GMT -5
- The most likely account of the similarities would seem to be that the stories are completely separate, but that many pieces out of which they are built --- the terms, the metaphors, the themes --- come in for a lot of reuse. This is a pretty conservative position, and I don't think it's too difficult to defend it. (But read on.) I agree on this. I don't think it's a deliberate way to write new stuff about Gideon, Charlemagne, Holly or Mary, but I sort of feel he uses the THS narrative as a reference point to what happens to other characters. Like the dead/alive and inside/outside things: I think you got it right in the first place. It's more literal than what I made it out to be yesterday. But he anchors those images and that language in something far less literal and more metaphorical. I've never really thought about the solo stuff having anything to do with the narrative in The Hold Steady catalog, untill I went back to it recently, with everything in this thread in mind. I still think it's lyrics outside of the narrative, but just as every lyric Craig has written sheds light on the narrative, the narrative sheds light on the outside lyrics as well. Or something like thtat. I can very much understand that And for what it's worth, I don't think there's any full story in the solo stuff anyway. I could be wrong, but to me they all sounds like short stories rather than chapters in a book. The characters names doesn't have to mean all that much, but so many of the characters seem so different from each other, situated at different place, at different stages in their lifes. We've learned from Hold Steady that this don't have to mean anything, that both names and places could be something other than what it appear to be, but whereas I always felt there was a story in The Hold Steady lyrics (allthough I had no idea how deep it went), I don't see the same thing in the solo material. It's not my business at all, but what I would really love is a tightly written short version of the Hold Steady narrative. On a blog or something like that. For all the people who would be amazed to dwell into all of this, but who will never read through this amazing thread in full. I think you should think about that
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 10, 2018 23:03:22 GMT -5
Yeah, on the one hand I'd like to redo it from the beginning, cleanly --- the missteps along the way are annoying in retrospect. And it would also be cool to see everything gathered in one place: comments on one song all in one place, a writeup of one character all in one place, etc. But on the other hand it would be a lot of work :-) I've kept going with the thing I'm doing here because I started it, and because it's all tied up in my head with Still Alive Carl and I don't want to mess with that. Beyond that, as long as it's jotted down somewhere for posterity, that's probably good enough for the time being.
I took a look at No Future and Jackson again today and, man, you are right that there's a lot of THS-like stuff in there. Jackson is a little remote, and without trying to figure out who Stephanie is first I'm not sure I see much of a way into that. But there's almost not a single line of No Future that couldn't be tied to something familiar.
I'm very far from believing this is right but you *could* make an argument that this is from Mary's point of view, addressed to Charlemagne after the crucifixion, starting with a reference to his "phone call" to her in Yeah Sapphire. The biggest problem with that is the "office talk" ... hard to see the Mary of LID etc. getting anywhere near an office (not that it says that's what's going on, but at any rate I don't know what it could mean). But most of the rest could work: getting nailed against dumpsters behind townie bars, gushing blood from her hands, bedsheets for curtains in the Rathskeller ("Saw the dawn through the crack in the curtains" [R&T]).
The Riverside Perkins is a chain restaurant / bakery at 27th and Riverside in Minneapolis, off of Franklin; I seem to remember that there's something else in one of the other solo songs about either a Perkins or a diner or a bakery, don't have the lyrics with me now to hunt it down. Could the devil be a dealer that she met there in high school, before her first experience with drugs? Was that Caesar?
The line "February is about as long as it is wide" looks like a classic Finn "riddle"; if that can be cracked open, it might shed some more light on what this is about.
Good ear you've got, in any case!
Let me do a few short ones today:
1) In Same Kooks, there's a weird background line that's almost whispered and barely audible:
Now we just need something to celebrate I wanna open some bottles up (background: I wanna open my body up) I'm getting tired Of all these styrofoam coffee cups
I don't really know what to make of this but I've wondered a few times if that's supposed to be the deep down still present, but almost totally suppressed voice of Mary underneath Holly's consciousness (SK is from Holly's perspective). On the one hand Mary has just committed suicide by finally touching Charlemagne, against her Christ's commandment not to touch her (see upthread on Noli Me Tangere etc.). So the wrist-slitting implication has a point of reference. On the other hand, maybe it has something to do with the idea that she's trapped deep down in her own body, and wants to get out?
I throw this one out here because the coffee cup thing is hard to parse, both here in SK and in No Future above. I'd always thought that the coffee cup here had to do with the cops (who I imagined were wired [CSTLN] from cigarettes [CSTLN] and coffee and being up all night dealing with the Party Pit murder) giving her coffee to sober her up, since this song mostly refers to her time in police custody. On the other hand, Holly lives off coffee and sugar in lieu of food when she's speeding [CatCT, C&N]. So does "I'm getting tired of all these styrofoam coffee cups" mean that she's come down thanks to her forced detox during the car ride?
Similarly, could the thing about "they punch my card at the coffee shop" in No Future mean that Holly's speeding again, and Mary's along for the ride?
2) In CiS, Charlemagne is described as having "eyes *just like* a lover," because he wasn't in fact a lover; as detailed upthread and in the calendar, his relationship with Holly was chaste. Nice little touch there.
3) In MoC, in the lines
And after the movie We got off the ground
the bit about "we got off the ground" refers specifically to the St Paul's conversion episode of the crucifixion, where they fell to the ground in the bright light of the projector (see "falling on the floor" [R&T]).
4) There are a bunch of lines about getting "pretty close":
they throw such killer parties, everybody gets pretty close [GoaH] we hung out pretty close with some questionable folks [SM] rubbed up pretty close to some rock and roll promoters [SM] I guess we all got pretty close to the roles we chose to play [Spectres]
Add those to the "Rubbed up on the bars on the bluff" line from TMIT and it's clear that all of these except the Spectres line refer specifically to the metal bar night in the Rathskeller; and it's not that the Spectres line doesn't refer to that, rather it enlarges on the theme to emphasize that these problems are "just what we wanted" [RP-style].
"Rubbing up pretty close" in the context of the metal bar incident could refer to the Narrator and especially Charlemagne getting beat up, but the really obvious referent is Mary getting high out of her mind and fucking the gang. And this specific meaning, with these specific words, adds new menace to A Slight Discomfort, when Gideon warns Mary:
If I were you I wouldn't get too close
5) I think I mentioned a couple of times that, out of all the songs in the catalog, Banging Camp was probably the most difficult one to break into; and even after being pretty sure that I had the big picture right, there were still a bunch of lines and even individual words that just wouldn't crack. One minor thing there that came into focus late was the line
She said it helps her to remember all the nights that we got over
I missed this earlier, but "got over" is used literally in the sense of "to get over it" or "to get over something." Mary, rehearsing for their upcoming reunion with the Skins in the part of Holly, is saying that the string helps her to remember all the nights that they used to be upset about ("we" is from the Narrator's perspective) --- that is, the nights that Holly spent being plied with hard drugs by Gideon until he murdered her --- until they got over the murder and became friends with Gideon again.
Falling asleep, gotta stop. Thanks as always for remembering Still Alive Carl, and I'll pick this up tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 11, 2018 23:14:39 GMT -5
Getting pretty close to finishing up the list ...
1) A couple of loose 'bug' references, which I think are in fact stray references to drug dealers, that escaped my notice earlier; one from Massive Nights:
We all kinda fumbled through the Jitterbug We were all powered up on some new upper drug
and one from For Boston (not from the story, but the themes are familiar):
He's trying to do a deal with me, And he's skittish like a centipede.
2) In the BAGIA reissue demo version of Same Kooks, we get
There were complicated kisses, clicks and hisses Gideon hitting off a pipe made from a Pringles can First there was Providence and then Prudence You gotta fall in love with whoever you can
A few things here. First, "Providence and then Prudence": I'd already made the case that the studio version of this line, "Hey hey Providence," was Gideon's last statement to Mary before (a) switching Holly's soul into her body (b) switching bodies with Charlemagne and committing suicide himself. (All in the calendar/upthread.) The explicit statement here that Providence (foreseeing, i.e. Mary the precog girl) was replaced by another girl is obviously pretty solid additional evidence in favor of this reading.
Providence as a handle for Mary doesn't need much explaining, but Prudence for Holly does. My guess is that it's some combination of the following: - Same girl on the outside (Pr---dence/Pr-dence), different girl on the inside (--ovi-----/--u-----). Not a big stretch if you've already got Providence to start with, and compare the detailed letter-play in the Clear Heart Full Eyes album name as explained in the GE Smith interview upthread. - Holly was prudent about making whatever deal was necessary to get the drugs she wanted. A stretch on its own, but not too bad for a situation in which some symmetry with Providence is obviously required.
Next, the Pringles can. I did a lousy job with this the first time through; in another case of mistaking the metaphorical for literal, I took the repeated references to "laser lights"
- Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows [SPayne] - Everybody's bathing in the laser lights [NS] - The laser lights looked mystical [JaJ]
to mean that Gideon's projector was literally a laser projector. Technically it could have been, but as I realized late, "clicks and hisses" and "then it went white" [SShoes] etc. are all plainly indicative of an old-school reel-to-reel film projector; "laser lights" is just a club metaphor, like "sweat and wet confetti" [MPADJs] etc. At any rate, after working through the confusion, this all got cleared up upthread.
But regardless of what type of projector it was, it needed a lens tube, and my reading continued/continues to be that the pipe made from a Pringles can (i.e., with the bottom cut off) was that lens tube. The changes in wording in the above lines strengthen that reading in a couple of ways:
- "Providence and then Prudence" underlines that the pipe is mentioned at the critical moment right between the crucifixion kiss and Holly's resurrection. This isn't a random detail among other assorted details, it has a crucial role in the magic trick (tricks) taking place in that moment. The one instrument that we know for a fact is involved in that magic trick is the projector.
- the addition of the detail about "hitting" strengthens the parallel with Holly's baptism: the word "hit" in the sense of "take a hit" occurs exactly twice in the THS canon, once during Holly's baptism ("take a hit and I'll duck your head") and once during Holly's resurrection ("hitting" here). This is on top of the fact that the word "pipe" also occurs exactly twice in the canon, once during Holly's baptism ("crosses made from pipes and planks / leaned up against the nitrous tanks") and once during Holly's resurrection ("pipe made from a Pringles can" here). Moreover, the crosses in the baptism are stated to be made from (a) pipes and (b) planks leaned up against the tanks; the cross in the crucifixion is made from (b) planks hammered together to build a giant ladder leaned up again the water tank [CSummer] ... which leaves (a) the pipe.
Crashing again; more tomorrow. Thanks to anyone still following along, for anything you've got for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 12, 2018 18:03:34 GMT -5
Quick login tonight ...
1) More about Gideon, the pipe, and Holly's resurrection:
I was falling asleep hard last night so the point about "hitting" didn't come out as clearly as it could have. We know that taking a hit was the magic-trick mechanism by which Gideon made Holly disappear. In the SK demo we see that hitting was also the magic-trick mechanism by which he made her reappear. These are the only two instances of "hit" in this sense in the songs. I think that's unlikely to be a coincidence.
Also, I wrote, "The one instrument that we know for a fact is involved in that magic trick is the projector," which is literally true; but in thinking about that it occurs to me that it's possible to get somewhere approaching this question from the metaphoric side also. The magic-trick metaphor for the resurrection is the old classic of waving a wand and pulling a rabbit from a hat, and note:
- wand: Gideon is shown "waving Marlboros like magic wands" [MM], again with smoking in analogy to hitting off the pipe. - hat: Gideon is shown with a "stovepipe hat" [Swish], another kind of pipe. - rabbit: Holly is described as a rabbit in CatCT (the "silly rabbit" Trix jingle)
It's not a new thing to see Craig use more than one side of an ambiguity to develop his story; this one's more difficult than most in part because it's at the center of the central event of the story, which is only ever talked about in extremely roundabout, allusive terms, and in part because the literal meanings of different parts of the ambiguity are hard to reconcile. That's a step I've tripped over before so maybe I should just say that I feel confident that these meanings are in there, that a magic trick took place in which they played a part, and leave it at that.
2) There were a couple of things with Curves and Nerves that I don't think I ever talked about.
First, the name of the song. Again, the "Revenge of the Pervs" movie is an allusion to the events of the crucifixion; pretty sure I talked about the "screams" (the Skins terrified by the ghost movie / murder scene) and the "jeans" (the whole western wear theme [SShoes, LA]). The "curves" seem to be a reference to Mary (in fringes and feathers, etc.) and maybe to the wild car ride through the parkways [OftC] afterward. That leaves "nerves"; being "nervous" is a theme of the crucifixion:
- We were nervous and restless, but not really bored [R&T] - Keep us floating up above the things that make us nervous [LA]
and maybe of Mary (compare "nervous cough" [BBlues, MM]) at the crucifixion in particular:
- I guess she seemed a bit nervous, do you think I'm that stupid? [SiM] - I feel Jesus in the tenderness of honest, nervous lovers [Citrus]
Second, the resurrection allusions at the end of the song:
- "Charlemagne in a shallow grave": a shallow grave, because he wouldn't stay lying in it (compare the angels at Jesus' tomb in NS) - "With a Nazareth tape": Nazareth as the home of Jesus, destined for resurrection - "And a vodka ice and Gatorade": a metaphor of resurrection, the idea being that this lets you drink yourself drunk but also rehydrates you at the same time!
Despite the resurrection theme, these lines don't come off as optimistic, and that's partly a function of what follows:
These hoodrat chicks are like razor blades They're pretty cheap but they'll cut you deep
The grave was shallow for Charlemagne's soul; but his body, and Gideon's soul with it, got cut deep.
Thanks for thinking of Still Alive Carl, who is still alive. A little bit more tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 13, 2018 23:29:27 GMT -5
Just a couple more things today ...
1) The whole family of Dallas metaphors could use a little filling out and cleaning up, too.
It starts with JFK, and Dallas as the place where he was shot; this is a metaphor for Charlemagne getting beat up in the Rathskeller metal bar (while Mary or Holly or both were screwing the Skins).
The JFK assassination is unified with the RFK assassination by referring to the metal bar as the Ambassador, the hotel where RFK was shot; so that "Kennedys got shot" [PJ] is actually a consistent image.
The second PJ line "some Kennedy OD'd while we watched on MTV" seems to refer to Holly as a Kennedy too. (Maybe this has to do with the fact that she and Charlemagne both come from Massachusetts, but there's probably no need to go that far, as long as it's right; and given the OD reference I don't see who else it can be.) The watching on MTV bit is a reference to the Didion novel in which watching the RFK assassination on a hotel TV is mentioned (somewhere upthread); "MTV" seems itself to be an ambiguous reference to Mary (Mary TV), who foresaw both the metal bar beating [CSunrise, Weekenders] and the crucifixion in her vision. If watching on MTV has to refer to RFK->Holly rather than RFK->Charlemagne, this wouldn't work, but the different episodes involved are clearly described and I have no real problem understanding this line to refer to now one, now the other.
This Dallas as "state of getting violently ambushed" metaphor is then expanded with the whole Dallas cowboys football angle (in BBreathing, C&N etc.; this is expanded on upthread). One piece of this that I missed is the "no one wins at violent shows" line in BBreathing, where "wins" is explicitly part of the football metaphor.
We've noted a few times that the non-story songs often echo story elements: I think that "if you get tired of his football friends" in YCMHLY is part of this same metaphor. That is, most of the song reads like something that could be addressed to Holly in her relationship with Gideon:
- "let your boyfriend tell the driver the best way to go": driving around with Gideon/Skins in the "big black cars"/"GTOs" - "you don't have a problem until you start to do it alone": when she retreated into her awkward silence and the "banging" stopped, Gideon killed her
and so there's a suggestion that the "football friends," following the above, are the Skins.
2) There are a few things in The Smidge that I missed earlier.
I mentioned that the historically accurate progressions over the decades in which the story takes place include changes in technology, and one of the things that we get at this stage (The Smidge has a single point of perspective, set in 2004) are "computers." That was enough of an occasion for a new rhyme with "Vancouver"; and given the context
When we couldn't get it here we used to cruise to Vancouver
it looks like just another metaphor for St. Paul, the idea being "the city across the border," or maybe also "the other twin city" (Vancouver, Canada as opposed to Vancouver, USA). (Or maybe even "the city across the river" in the sense of Vancouver, WA from the perspective of Portland, OR, but that seems like a stretch to me.) Which fits a common theme in the story [SPayne, YS, etc.].
Another line:
Now we never go dancing 'cause we're not really moving
is more evidence of Charlemagne's fears that Jesse is going to end up like Holly: compare
How's she supposed to think about how it's going to move in the morning [HJ]
I've never really had a strong read on why Hurricane J uses the word "move" in that context; I suppose the obvious implication is that you can't move when you're dead, but it's still a difficult word to get a grip on. In spite of that I think the parallel is clearly there, not least because it's an odd thing to say in Smidge, too.
Thanks for reading along this far, and for keeping Still Alive Carl in your thoughts if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 14, 2018 21:44:03 GMT -5
1) I mentioned the thing about MTV being a ref to Mary (Mary TV), and there are a few similar items that I missed, some of which have interesting implications:
In the DLME line:
All those hangers-on, those girls lifting up their shirts when the cameras come on
the "girls lifting up their shirts when the cameras come on" is of course Mary, who goes into a state of aroused ecstasy when she sees her vision; "the cameras" are her visionary power.
Somewhere in an interview --- maybe the Views From Rock Falcon videos? --- Craig remarks that this line from TOT:
The only thing she talks about's TV
originally had the lyric "the scene" instead of "TV." The fact that TV=Mary's vision means that "the scene" in this context also means her vision; which lends an unexpected level of meaning to "I'm kinda saving myself for the scene" [YLHF] (delivered by Charlemagne in imitation/critique of Mary). Just an incredible line, and mind-blowing to be hearing new things in it after years, now.
There are phone metaphors for Mary's vision as well (in AE, YS, arguably C&N), including the following two lines about "dialing" spoken by/to Mary (which lends a little clarity to the Swish line):
My UPC is dialed into the system [Swish] Now you're going off to the dial tone [OWL]
Finally, the verse from CSunrise which describes Mary's vision of the metal bar
Onward Christian soldiers We're gonna bash right through your borders I bet your next party gets sketchy I saw the new kids nodding off
is apparently referred to by both TSPotC and MoC:
We spent a few years nodding off in matinees [MoC] We used to meet underneath the marquees, we used to nod off in the matinees [TSPotC]
The matinees in which they nodded off were Mary's vision! Doesn't change our understanding of the plot, but it's a great twist on the lines (and is similar to "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders], which also refers to crossing paths in her visions).
2) Speaking of movies, I only noticed this late, but Teenage Liberation also describes its "episodes" as filmed productions.
'Seventeen' was an underfunded comedy 'Nineteen' was a 90 second short
Like other "not a part of the story" songs, many of the themes and events described still could be seen to allude in a vague way to the events of the story, and I hear more of these over time. I won't go through the whole song since I did a good bit of it upthread, just the stuff I've heard recently. I mentioned
And most of the jokes just kinda hung around and died
as seeming likely to tie in with the jokes-and-laughing early relationship theme.
About a cartoon kid who sits and drinks on his porch
After reading the Lifter Puller lyrics it's clear that "porch" goes in the list with vestibule, lobby, entrance, portal, etc. Don't know what "cartoon" is about though.
He took one good swipe at his wrist but he missed so he lived
This one I might have mentioned before, but suggests Charlemagne's faked stabbing of his own image.
The end of the song has a couple of good ones that really seem to refer to the crucifixion:
Such sweaty exultation and soft, sharp penetration On unsupervised vacations
plays off both the stabbing and sexual meanings of "penetration" heard elsewhere in "Penetration Park" etc.; "unsupervised vacations" could be meant as a play on the trips down to St. Paul. And
Kissing boys and getting wasted
can be heard as a specific reference to the crucifixion kiss --- Mary kissed him and died, in other words "wasted" as "blown away."
Very little left to go here, will continue tomorrow. Thanks for reading and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 15, 2018 3:39:07 GMT -5
Finally, the verse from CSunrise which describes Mary's vision of the metal bar Onward Christian soldiers We're gonna bash right through your borders I bet your next party gets sketchy I saw the new kids nodding off is apparently referred to by both TSPotC and MoC: We spent a few years nodding off in matinees [MoC] We used to meet underneath the marquees, we used to nod off in the matinees [TSPotC] The matinees in which they nodded off were Mary's vision! Doesn't change our understanding of the plot, but it's a great twist on the lines (and is similar to "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders], which also refers to crossing paths in her visions). This is good stuff! And I would say the last (?) mention of a matinee also connects with this reading: We had some massive highs We had some crushing lows We had some lusty little crushes We had those all ages hardcore matinee showsYou're far better equipped than me to decipher the meaning here, but I dare to say that "hardcore" in the context of Mary and here visions, probably should be read more sexually than as a reference to a musical genre. Upthread you wrote about how the beginning of the same verse I'm quoting fits pretty well to the crucifixion. This part does too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 15, 2018 19:22:43 GMT -5
This is good stuff! And I would say the last (?) mention of a matinee also connects with this reading: We had some massive highs We had some crushing lows We had some lusty little crushes We had those all ages hardcore matinee showsYou're far better equipped than me to decipher the meaning here, but I dare to say that "hardcore" in the context of Mary and here visions, probably should be read more sexually than as a reference to a musical genre. Upthread you wrote about how the beginning of the same verse I'm quoting fits pretty well to the crucifixion. This part does too. Oh man you're totally right. I'd always thought of "shows" as referring to Mary and the Narrator putting on a show "dancing too close" and eventually going down on each other at prom; but I think you're right, it's Mary's own "show" that's being referred to here. (And it's "all ages" in the other sense --- she's 17/18 here, but visionary Charlemagne is 33.) I haven't got access to the music just now and I lost my scribbled notes about the lyrics, but I remember the BAGIA reissue demo version of this line being changed in a way that supports what you're saying, too --- I think it was We had some hardcore all-ages matinee shows or We had some all-ages matinee hardcore shows with, either way, increased emphasis on the "hardcore." Nice catch. I had a bunch of stuff about Gideon that I wanted to put together for today, so another list: 1) The obvious link to the Biblical Gideon, mentioned before, is that he was the one who defeated a superior hostile army with sounds and special effects. But there's another: in Milkcrate Mosh, Gideon is set up as Solomon ("Gideon ... kings ... Baby") in the famous judgment of the suit brought by two women, played here by Mary and Holly (Holly's going to walk away with the verdict); and the Biblical Gideon is also a Judge (Judges 6-8). 2) In ASD, Gideon tells Mary: Seen a couple slaughters and they've mostly turned out OK which looks like another C&N-films-style use of an offhand detail to foreshadow the two big fights of the story: the metal bar and the crucifixion. That's a Finn "mostly" right there. 3) Side note while on the subject of ASD: I've been talking in the last dozen posts or so about this theme of early relationships, with the guy making jokes and the girl laughing; we saw the Narrator being described this way in HM ("Thinking things were funny") and MN ("Everyone was funny"). In ASD, Gideon catches Mary as she falls away from the Narrator, and while he's talking about the "soccer players" [SN] as well as the Narrator ("thought you're through with all the bougie guys" [ASD]), it seems pretty clear now that it's the Narrator in the crosshairs of They're never funny and they're all so scared to die 4) In Barfruit Blues, Went down with the girls gone wild and he woke up with a middle man is a passing mention of the fact that Gideon was still with Mary at the time of the metal bar episode. (Plenty of evidence for this elsewhere, but that's a nice additional bit.) 5) The "I keep trying" lines in Knuckles are all about Gideon trying to pass himself off as a bad guy gangster; in that light "Freddy Knuckles" looks specifically like a reference to the "punching rings" of Milkcrate Mosh. 6) I've already talked about the Osseo verse in YLHF being Charlemagne's reproach to Mary for her past with Gideon, but until recently I had missed that one detail Your little hoodrat friend got me high though is a deliberate echo of other lines underlining Gideon's role as the guy who gets girls high: with whoever's gonna get me the highest [HH] with the wild eyes when they ask to get you high [HSL] 7) The line in Barely Breathing The kids are all distracted / The kids are a distraction which is echoed in Entitlement Crew: Got distracted by the chorus when the kids all sang along gave me a lot of trouble for a while. The "violent show" context of BBreathing, and the fact that the song comes around from talking about the metal bar episode in the past, to talking about Gideon's plan for the crucifixion, strongly suggests that this has something to do with the crucifixion, and moreover that the distraction in question is a distraction from the violence. And in fact, that's what happens. The kids are a distraction (Mary, Charlemagne, and the Narrator's faked enactment of the stabbing of Charlemagne has the Skins locked on in terror), the kids are all distracted (they themselves are busy with the show they're putting on), and only Holly sees the real act of violence, when Gideon falls from the water tower, dead ("cried and she told us about Jesus" [FN], "can't fly cause their wings are clipped" [SK], "one townie falls in the forest" [OftC]). I think the Entitlement Crew turns this same lyric in a different direction, but more on that when I get to EC. 8) Speaking of Holly having witnessed Gideon's death, in OftC she's smoking outside the courthouse, and in thinking angrily about it, thinks Who the hell cares who gets caught in the middle? It's not 100% clear whether she's referring to Charlemagne (because she's sick of justice and fairness and doesn't care any more) or Gideon (because she thinks other peoples' justice and fairness, which only cares about rich girls and not about townies, is bullshit); I would tend to hear the latter, but in fact Holly seems to be done with Charlemagne, and more importantly the expression "caught in the middle" is a familiar Charlemagne theme: tonight it's like he's stuck between stations [SBS] I was kicking it with cousins [HSL] that two-sided tape it gets way too sticky [SG] 9) The fact that Holly saw Gideon fall and Charlemagne didn't leads us back to yet another fantastic double meaning from YLHF that I'd completely missed: I was waiting for my ride I got jumped from behind I got punctured Charlemagne got "jumped" when he got punctured in the literal sense that Gideon stabbed himself in Charlemagne's body and then jumped from the water tower. And it was "from behind" both in the sense that his ghost had its back turned to it when it happened, and that he himself didn't see it (only Holly did). For the millionth time, that's fucking incredible writing. 10) The GLS line you want the scars but don't want the war is of course a D4 reference, but there's a specific reference too to the attempt to fake Charlemagne's death; the kids wanted the "scars" of his death, but not the actual violence. Only Gideon knew that "words alone never would save us," and killed himself to make it stick. This is getting to be a ton of little stuff, I realize, but all these things feed back into each other, sometimes leading to big outcomes; and some of them are just too good in their own right not to share. Anyway, just one or two days of this left, then it's on to Snake In The Shower and Entitlement Crew. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 16, 2018 7:14:50 GMT -5
This is good stuff! And I would say the last (?) mention of a matinee also connects with this reading: We had some massive highs We had some crushing lows We had some lusty little crushes We had those all ages hardcore matinee showsYou're far better equipped than me to decipher the meaning here, but I dare to say that "hardcore" in the context of Mary and here visions, probably should be read more sexually than as a reference to a musical genre. Upthread you wrote about how the beginning of the same verse I'm quoting fits pretty well to the crucifixion. This part does too. Oh man you're totally right. I'd always thought of "shows" as referring to Mary and the Narrator putting on a show "dancing too close" and eventually going down on each other at prom; but I think you're right, it's Mary's own "show" that's being referred to here. (And it's "all ages" in the other sense --- she's 17/18 here, but visionary Charlemagne is 33.) I started writing something about "all ages" refering to 17 vs 33 as well, but couldn't quite phrase it. Glad you caught it anyway. The line preceeding it also rings a bell. Both "lust" and "crush" appears in the same line in Stevie Nix. Don't know if there's a connection, or if it means anything, but still. Enjoying all these small discoveries you roll out here on a daily basis. Keep them coming!
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 16, 2018 23:37:28 GMT -5
The line preceeding it also rings a bell. Both "lust" and "crush" appears in the same line in Stevie Nix. Don't know if there's a connection, or if it means anything, but still. It's funny you bring this up, because for the stuff on Citrus below I was trying to think of other important lines about "touch" besides the ones in Chips Ahoy and Citrus, and I ended up being puzzled about "touched" in this same opening verse to Stevie Nix. And then I read what you wrote here, and I'm thinking you've hit on the answer. Here's what I mean. Stevie Nix opens with these lines: You came into the party with a long black shawl And the guys from the front lawn were making jokes about the white swan Some nights we just need to get touched and rub up against something plush Some nights it's just a crush and some nights it's blood lust She said "we might use you later on Meet me right back here around dawn" We know that this is all in Holly's voice, addressing Gideon as "you," and referring to Mary coming in with him as the "white swan." I'd always assumed that the next two lines were about Gideon being out of his mind, high on speed and looking to fuck, with foreshadowing both of his hookup with Holly later that night, and of the future time that that lust would lead him to kill her. But consider what she's saying a little more closely. She calls Mary a traitor (White Swan), then says these two lines, then moves right into describing how Mary went to work setting up her production (compare the "Phil Spector" producer metaphor in MM. As an aside, "we might use you later on" looks like it could be another borrowing from Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas; a few pages after the call comes in on the pink telephone on the patio of the Beverly Hills Hotel, we get a woman from a film crew telling Dr. Gonzo, “We’re filming the race for a TV series – maybe we can use you,” to which he replies “Use me?”; and over-the-top bad shit ensues.) So, what if these two lines refer not to Gideon, but to Mary? She's the one who won't let her Savior touch her, but needs to get touched, and rubs up against the plush sweatpants of the townies to compensate. (The sweatpants sound like a stretch, but they, and the "something" big that Charlemagne has in them, are the focal point of Mary's erotic vision, and fuck if I know what else in the whole story could possibly be "plush" if not them.) And she's the one whose crush on Charlemagne is sometimes blood lust --- not just an ecstasy that makes her hands bleed, but a consuming desire that, tonight, makes her (the traitor) ready to have Holly killed. So yes, I'm prepared to see that "lusty little crushes" line as a deliberate link to this, and evidence that it's Mary who's being referred to in both places. Which is again some pretty mind-blowing writing. Moving on to the other thing I wanted to get to today: another trove of lines that seem like generic comments, but in fact are subtly connected to the story, is found in Citrus. The song is from Charlemagne's perspective, after the crucifixion; we'd talked upthread about how Lost in fog and love and faithless fear I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere refers specifically to his experience of Holly's pavlovian, give-me-the-speed-Gideon kisses after "Judas" Mary's suicidal kiss. Nothing can top that line, but there are others in the song with unexpected meaning. Hey barroom, hey tavern I find hope in all the souls you gather It's clearer now that for all the generic references to "harbor bars," "townie bars," and "bars on the bluffs," there's really one barroom/tavern in the story, and that's the Rathskeller metal bar, adjacent to the Party Pit. Charlemagne's soul survived that place, though his body died; Holly's soul was summoned back there, too; maybe he's hoping that Mary's soul is still in there somewhere, and that's why he keeps giving her alcohol to drink (see the whole Wedding at Cana discussion above)? Hey whiskey, hey ginger I come to you with rigid fingers This really looks like "Ginger and Jack" from the Swish, which I've already argued refer to Mary and Gideon, an item back at the time of the Swish party. Now, with the crucifixion, they're technically reunited; it's Gideon's body with Mary's body in the car; only in Gideon's body it's really Charlemagne, coming to her with "rigid fingers," hoping finally to touch her, to fuck her (see also the innuendo of "when we come together" in the second verse). Hey citrus, hey liquor I love it when you touch each other So if "hey whiskey, hey ginger" is about Gideon's body and Mary's body, in the context of the song's broader subject of Charlemagne's disappointed attempt to reach Mary, then it seems pretty clear to me that "hey citrus, hey liquor" also has to be about Mary's body and Gideon's body (liquor=whiskey), respectively. She's "ginger" because she's a redhead (like Mary Magdalene; see the discussions about this, ginger and the claddagh ring upthread); I think "citrus" has to be a reference to this too. That's why Charlemagne leads with "I love it when you touch each other"; because with Mary, it's all about not being allowed to touch --- "How am I supposed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you?" and the Noli Me Tangere interdict fucking up the whole religiously charged situation. Well, now he can touch her, since it's not his body any more; but Mary isn't there. Enough for today. Once again, if you're reading this and have some spare prayer capacity for Still Alive Carl, thank you. I'll do a little bit more tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 17, 2018 22:26:04 GMT -5
Had a long heavy day, and I'm already gassed before having a chance to sit down and write, so this one's going to be really short. The one good thing I did today was finally to sit and listen to the Celebration Rock podcast ( link) in which Craig talks at length about Joe Strummer. It's a great listen regardless of any relevance to the Constructive Summer lines: Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer I think he might have been our only decent teacher but of course I was curious about anything that would shed more light on the meaning of those words. The truth is that I didn't catch any definite explanation (especially not of "decent" as opposed to something else). But Craig described Strummer a couple of times as a "we can do this" figure playing "I can do this" music, and that seems to match the spirit of the Constructive Summer enterprise --- the kids have been stuck in a bad rut for a long time, but now finally, suddenly, they can see their way clear to taking action. Craig also mentions the mural on 7th and A in NYC, and for the rest is very familiar with the things Strummer did and said, so I don't have a problem imagining that these lines might refer specifically to "the future is unwritten" as a direct response to the doom implicit in Mary's vision. That's an idea I kind of like. As always, thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by muzzleofbees on Jan 18, 2018 7:53:00 GMT -5
Since that's sort of been my task in this thread over the years, I'm gonna keep dropping some thoughts on stuff from Lifter Puller and Craig's solo material. Last time around I got through Clear Heart Full Eyes, and today I went back to Sandra From Scranton from Faith In The Future. Mostly because of that Scranton line in Entitlement Crew.
A little bit of Google activity reveals to me that there are several places in USA called Scranton. I think I took it for granted that Craig was talking about some place in Minnesota, and a few years back I googled "Scranton Minnesota", got a map hit, and didn't think more about it. But on closer inspection, that seems to be a really, really small place in/nearby Hibbing. I guess it's more likely that he refers to some of the other Scranton's. And maybe there's a deliberate point in not being specific on which Scranton he's talking about.
Anyway, a few quick points on Sandra From Scranton:
- Its core story is about a she-person who's in some sort of hiding, or at least who has withdrawn from a scene. She don't go to shows anymore, she's done playing music, she's bored of the tunes - But "she still knows the boys and the blues" - Still, in the last line she's "all dressed up and dancing", don't know if this is supposed to be in present tense, or if it's the narrator of the song's memory about her doing so - She's into drugs, but explains it with "medical reasons" - Entitlement Crew has a "theme" - or at least a few lines - about not knowing where a she-person is living. Sandra From Scranton has the line "She asked where I was living these days/ I decided to tell her the truth". Obviously, they both reference Scranton. - The most interesting thing is the lines who alludes Cheyenne Sunrise here
SFS: "Bash through the boards" (at least this is what lyrics online says, haven't listened to it to double check) CS: "We're gonna bash right through your borders"
SFS: "Wipe the grime from the windows" CS: "Wipe that ship right from your shoulder"
Oh, and one last thing. I think it's fair to assume that Craig's talking about a different Scranton than the place near/outside of Hibbing. But IF that's the reference, it could lead further in the direction of Sandra having something to do with Mary (or, Holly-in-Mary, which is sort of what I'm thinking of when hearing it): Zoom in on Google Maps and check out where you end up if you head north-west from the Scranton pinpoint. Looks like an indian trail to me.
There's a few other recurring words/images here, but these are the ones I found interesting enough to write down.
Again, I'm not saying this is a part of the story or anything, but there's a few things to think about here.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 19, 2018 0:16:00 GMT -5
I've been wondering about Scranton from the Entitlement Crew also. That would be awesome if there were a Hibbing connection of some kind, and it was fun to poke around Minnesota on Google Maps again (good times!), but in the end I have no idea what the connection there could be, if any. The best I can do with Scranton is to guess that it's another Twin City reference; the main Scranton in the US is the one in Pennsylvania, which usually goes together in a sentence with Wilkes-Barre to the southwest (there's the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton airport, Wilkes-Barre/Scranton sports teams, etc. Of course I'm only looking for an interpretation for the sake of Entitlement Crew; I have no idea whether the THS style of city metaphors still apply in the solo stuff.)
So maybe a metaphoric St. Paul? In Lifter Puller vs. The End of the Evening, Scranton is the place they get to by speeding down Lake Street for some 3.2, en route to the crucifixion; this is of course pretty speculative, but it seems promising.
I think you're right that the "dressed up and dancing" lines are about the past: "wipe the grime from the windows" sounds to me like "scrub away the dirt that's built up over time, and see again how things looked when they were shiny and new."
I thought I remembered the SfS line as "bash through the borders" just like in CSunrise, but forgot to check today (CD sitting on my desk at work). I took the line here as meaning something like "jump through the borders of this picture of the past (through the grimy window) and look around you, remember how it used to be" --- deliberately getting a fresh use out of an old line. But that's just a first impression.
(Also, "wipe that chip right off your shoulder": in idiomatic English, to have a chip on your shoulder means to be unreasonably resentful about something. I'm pretty sure this is another instance of Mary telling the Narrator, "quit complaining --- this is exactly what you wanted.")
I wanted to dig back into Most People Are DJs and Rock Problems a little bit.
In the discussion upthread I argued that MPADJs and RP are about the same party/same kitchen/same girl, and I still think that's right. But after picking up on a few small things that I'd missed earlier, I've come to the conclusion that I was wrong about *when* that party takes place, which in turn affects a few other points of interpretation.
What I wrote above was this (set in Spring 2004):
I think now that this is not quite right. First, there's the thing I noted a few posts back, that
They got some new guy that looks just like Phil Lynott We're stumbling but I think we're still in it
must refer to the Narrator (the musician) disguised as the "new guy" in the Skins and barely hanging on in the middle of all the drugs and violence, as recounted in Ask Her For Adderall. There are plenty of songs in which Craig jumps around to, as he says, "talk in more detail about that little scene," one after another; but I'm thinking now that this song may be one of the ones that's all (or mostly) about a single definite time, in this case a night during those two weeks with the Skins. By this reading:
1) The MPADJs line
It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy
no longer sounds like a generic warning about the violence that comes with drugs, but a specific comment about the over-the-top insanity of those two weeks of life with the Skins [AHfA, SShoes, IHTWTDFY]. The RP line
I didn't even want to go out 'cause I was way too frightened
refers to this too ("there were times that it terrified me" [IHTWTDFY]).
2) The two versions of Mary telling off the Narrator, saying that he's got exactly the life he bargained for --- both the version in MPADJs:
She got me cornered by the kitchen I said I'll do anything but listen ... Baby take off your beret Everyone's a critic
and the one in RP:
She said I just can't sympathize With your rock and roll problems Isn't this what we wanted? Some major rock and roll problems
--- appear to be exactly the same fight that's described in AHfA:
Now Holly won't say hi to me Cause I'm in love with my anxiety which is again a fight with Mary disguised as Holly (see upthread on AHfA for detailed explanation of "anxiety" here).
3) In the RP version of the "cornered" line:
That one girl got me cornered in the kitchen, I said I'll do anything but clean
the word "clean" appears to refer specifically to "bleaching out the bloodstains" [GLS], the critical "keep your bandages clean" [SShoes] work of this same period with the Skins. More on this in the bit about changed implications below.
4) The events at the end of MPADJs include reference to Charlemagne-disguised-as-Gideon and Gideon not sleeping:
A thousand kids will fall in love in all these clubs tonight A thousand other kids will end up gushing blood tonight Two thousand kids won't get all that much sleep tonight Two thousand kids they still feel pretty sweet tonight Yeah, and I still feel pretty sweet
which again takes place in their "always awake" time with the Skins. Note that the numbers "one thousand"/"two thousand" here appear to really mean one and two, respectively: Mary is the one who falls in love (with her vision), Charlemagne is the one who ends up gushing blood (in her vision), Charlemagne and Gideon are the ones who don't sleep (between them). Then maybe the Narrator and Mary are the ones who end up feeling sweet, I don't know.
5) The above points are already a lot, but here comes the really great one.
We know by the count of "five" in Knuckles that the Narrator "died" in order to become the New Kid. In RP, we get the following:
Back home we were listening to Catholic Boy And I got hung up on the people who died I didn't even want to go out 'cause I was way too fried
In this metaphoric expression, the person who "died" (ignoring the Jim Carroll Band reference) is the Catholic Boy, the Narrator [OWL, LID etc.], himself.
But even that's not everything; later the song continues
Didn't want to go out but it felt really right when someone put on "Heaven Tonight"
These same lines are deliberately foreshadowed by another song on the album, Our Whole Lives, when the Narrator (in youth and innocence) says
But I want to go to heaven on the day I die
So, according to Rock Problems, he did get to "Heaven Tonight" on the day he died; and it was even just what he wanted. That's unreal writing.
Now, for the additional implications that are slightly different from what I'd been thinking:
6) I had thought that the need to preserve their disguises for two weeks, reflected in the stitches they've got for Mary's stigmata (see treatment of SShoes and RH upthread) and the urgent reminder to "keep your bandages clean" [SShoes] must mean that Mary stopped the whole fucking-the-Skins-and-bleeding routine in the meantime. But if MPADJs and RP belong to the same timeframe, this can't be right. The lines
We get to the place and she don't want to dance, she says she's not really into this track She wants to know what's going on in the room that's all the way in the back
are already heavy with innuendo that this is what's going on --- compare the Lifter Puller line from Mick's Tape:
And the guys in the bathroom wanna meet my girl in the backroom
And of course MPADJs is explicit about what's "going down":
It's going down right now in Lowertown They're skipping off the good ship U.S.S.S.S.S.S.S.S.S. Sexuality Searching for the merchant with the five second delivery
So now the question is how this can happen without the Skins knowing that she's Mary, whom they certainly know, and not Holly --- in other words, how she can avoid giving herself away with the bleeding hands. (The only problem here is the hands; they used to get blown in groups by Holly in the past anyway [C&N, Swish, etc.], so that part as such was only what they were used to.)
I suppose then that if she's got stitches in her hands [RH, SShoes] then maybe she isn't bleeding too much; plus she's got the navy sheets [NS] so that any "blood on the bed" (familiar from SPayne, Ambassador, etc.) won't be noticeable. That seems a little crazy, but it actually means we have to stretch less to understand
Everybody's coming onto navy sheets
which now clearly refers to the Skins doing their usual thing with her; and it also explains
That one girl got me cornered in the kitchen, I said I'll do anything but clean
a little better. Like Meatloaf, the Narrator will do anything for love, but he won't wash out the blood and jizz from her sheets and bandages after the girl he loves is done with her gangbang.
7) Second, it's no longer possible to read the Narrator's "most people are DJs / and everything gets played" line as advice that sticks with Mary, leading her finally (as recounted in R&T) to seize authorship of her vision and try to change the outcome; with this new reading, that decision on her part (the R&T one) must already have taken place in the past in order for them to find themselves with the Skins in the present.
Again, that simplifies things in some respects; Mary never listened to the Narrator in the past, and it's no stretch to believe that she wouldn't start listening to him now, either.
Some other lines need new handling, but most of those either aren't difficult ("the girls want to go the party" now has to mean "girls" in the Weekenders sense, that is, Holly+Mary) or are still completely opaque to me ("jamming jetskis into the jetty now" with Charlemagne?). But I'm satisfied that the above must be right in general. I should probably fix this point in the calendar, too, and I guess I will when I get around to it.
As always, as always, thanks very much for sticking with all of this, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by thunderbirdcarpet on Jan 19, 2018 12:32:34 GMT -5
Don't have anything significant to contribute, but I wanted to say thanks and that it's really cool that you've done all this work. I didn't know your friend, but I know that he'd have been impressed as hell.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2018 0:14:29 GMT -5
Thanks very much, man, I really appreciate that. It's kind of a strange thing for me to have ended up doing, but it seemed to make sense on its own terms when I started, plus there's no doubt that the songs are truly great and deserve this kind of attention. So I'm just plowing ahead, keeping my fingers crossed for my friend. I'm glad you like it. The MPADJs/RP revision was the end of all my assorted notes, so I'm ready to move on and take a crack at Snake In The Shower. (Doing SitS before EC, because EC makes for a better finale.) The "2 New Songs!!!" thread here on the boards turned me on to an incredible resource I hadn't known existed, the Clicks And Hisses website ( link), with the authoritative lyrics to both Snake In The Shower and Entitlement Crew (fortunately for me, because I would never have worked them all out correctly myself). The site has a different take on some things than I do, but it's a huge, gorgeous project and is already hands down the first place to go for anyone interested in a deeper take on the lyrics. And it's being updated with new material all the time. Go check it out, and bookmark it if you haven't. SitS is a complicated song to take apart; let's start with the who and the when. Who: The key line here is "Say what you will man / I don't think that theres much to discuss." With that "man," and several hints about a third-party Gideon figure, this song can only be told from the point of view of the Narrator speaking to Charlemagne. There are also several passages in which the Narrator goes into detail about *how* the situation has gone bad, and in so doing refers to a generic "you" that is clearly Mary. When: The whole bit about "in between places" locates things in the 2004 era before Easter, when they're hiding out with Gideon ("staying / on Columbus between 28th and Lake" [CF]) or running around for two weeks with the Skins ("we tried to stay with your sister / Now we're staying wherever" [SShoes]). The lines about "her friend" suggests that things begin while they're still in Gideon's apartment. This squares with "the doctors hook you up to computers" too, since Charlemagne and Mary pay a visit to the doctor during that same period ("The doctors said that it was all in his head" [RH]). The later lines "Before we left the city we went out to some party / Before we hit the party we stopped off for supplies" echo both "the girls want to go to the party" of RP and the stepwise progress of "Working backwards from the doctor to the drugs" verse of MPADJs. It seems likely that SitS finishes with them leaving Gideon's apartment to join up with the Skins at the party. And now that I think about it, this clears up an important plot point. Namely, the MPADJs/RP party must be the place *where* they first join up with the Skins, as opposed to a place where they go on one of the nights *after* they've joined up. That would fit the Narrator's characterization of the day of the party as "the day I die" (see yesterday's discussion of OWL/RP) in order to be reborn as the New Kid. It would also very likely make "working backwards" in MPADJs an elliptical way of referring to "Holly and Gideon" going "backwards" in time to rejoin the Skins, 1996/97-style --- which would mean that the visit to the "doctor" of MPADJs is the very same visit described in both RH and SitS (i.e. the one where Mary gets her stitches). And "jamming jetskis into the jetty now" would be a ceremonial second "jumping in" of Gideon into the Skins (except that in this case it's Charlemagne disguised as Gideon, with his Rocco Siffredi Special tucked in his sweatpants). So, they do actually proceed in order - from the doctor ("doctor" [RH, SitS], also implied after the fact in "stitches" [SShoes]) - to the drugs ("Before we hit the party we stopped off for supplies" [SitS]) - to the packie (nothing, but OWL also decribes checking with the guy on the corner while hitting the packie for a bottle to go) - to the taxi / to the cabbie ("So we called up your guy, and when he comes we're gonna ask for a ride" [RP]) - to the club ("We get to the place and she don't want to dance" [RP]) That has to be right. So, going through SitS in order: It seems like you've already decided. I don't think that theres much to discuss. I think this is the Narrator, who's never been super happy about the staged crucifixion plan [Ambassador, HSL], conceding to Charlemagne that he knows he's made up his mind; they're going to rejoin the Skins and wait for their chance to go down to the Party Pit to fake his death. While we've been in between places we’ve mostly been staying At some house in the mountains her friend isn't using. She said he used to be a pretty huge producer. He doesn't seem that huge anymore. Again, this is Gideon's upstairs apartment on Columbus between 28th and Lake [CF], to which Mary first gave them a ride [OftC]. Gideon used to be a pretty huge provider of drugs, but not so much since he left the Skins to work at the tire shop. We found a torch in the drawer. We found the foil on the floor. There was blood on the buttons when I picked up the phone. The "blackened foil" of CatCT is also associated with Gideon; we're back to talking about the drugs as a plague, and about Mary herself ("blood" and "phone") as the primary casualty in the eyes of the Narrator. Oh, what happens is you blow out your sensors. Then you don't know what you should feel. And your body's just another container And your blood is just part of the deal. Now the chorus, and the Narrator talks about what's happened to Mary in detail. "Blow out your sensors" recalls "blowing out the speakers on your stereo" [OWL] (though it seems to mean exactly the opposite thing: under the influence of drugs, it's the "stereo" visions that overpower Mary's senses, rather than the other way around). Her body is, and will in reality soon become, just another container for Holly. Not sure what the bit about "your blood" means specifically, but it's obviously Mary's blood (maybe it means that it's just another aspect of her fucking/getting high transactions that they have to manage?). They’re scratching at the walls in the wheelhouse. And it’s sounding like it's Trapped Under Ice. Remember when we thought this was better. There was a snake in the shower last night. Ice in this case again means meth. The wheelhouse is the high-up command room of a ship, like Gideon's upstairs apartment where they've been staying; a metaphor that would fit literally via wheelhouse=tire shop, too (this place has grey "walls" that come in for mention both in RP and CSummer). The "snake in the shower" is another instance of the fanged creature / needles / drugs metaphor; the "shower" part is obscure to me, but I don't think the general drift is hard to parse. We dug in pretty deep and we were almost asleep Then someone put a brick through the window. Criminal Fingers tells us that the Skins are tracking down Charlemagne; maybe this refers to an episode of them closing in on him (or maybe it's some metaphoric way of referring to Charlemagne himself supposedly fleeing out the window when the cops come in [CF], not that I see how exactly). Vetiver and cinnamon. Colfax and Sheridan. Covered up in ticker tape New fangled American Man. This seems to be a series of references to immersion in the world of drugs. Colfax and Sheridan are two streets in Uptown Minneapolis, which however cross in "Denver," the state of being high. As we saw earlier, "Covered up in ticker tape" refers to being covered in powder in the clubs. "New fangled American Man" seems to be an OwtB-style reference to the big-time-dealer success Charlemagne has been hunting. The doctors hook you up to computers To figure out where we went wrong. The technician put on Cat and the Cobra. The nurses laid down on the lawn. Talked about the doctor visit above. I don't know what the Cat and the Cobra reference is beyond a shout out to Les Savy Fav, but of course the cobra is a snake, and Gideon's apartment has posters of panthers in it. (Some place where she cat sits?) That's all I got. What happens is you blow out the sensors. Then you can’t tell the key from the kite. They’re fooling around with thunder and lightning. There was a snake in the shower last night. Thunder and lightning follow the regular THS storm/addiction metaphor; adding a new dimension to Mary's no-touch commandment, the key and the kite are a reminder of the danger of touching (like Benjamin Franklin, who was badly shocked) something that seems to be part of the sensible world, but actually belongs to a higher one. There was a kid on the corner with a coat of many colors. He said you wanna be tamed or you wanna get wild? Pulled a stem from his sleeve and said try one of these. You’ll dream like a king little child. The Joseph metaphors ("coat of many colors," Gen. 37:3, and "dream like a king," Gen. 41:15) blur with the metaphor of a magician pulling a flower ("stem") from his sleeve, like the "messed-up magician" dealer Skins; "wild" is another marker associated with Gideon ("the wild eyes" [HSL]), also suggesting one of the dealer Skins. Note that the pharaoh's dream interpreted by Joseph concerned seven years of plenty and good living, followed by years of starvation and wasting; the kids' early, "better" years are giving way to something darker. Someone made a joke that seemed hopeful. About things that go bump in the night. At first it kind of picked up the party. Then it kinda ruined your life. The "things that go bump in the night" are the fanged vampire things on the one hand, and maybe gangbangers in this context too; the "party favors" [MM, EC] that picked up the party were accompanied by some pretty scary party people, and by some bad consequences in their own right. That pretty much covers it; will try to get on to Entitlement Crew tomorrow. Thanks a lot for reading along, and thanks for remembering Still Alive Carl if you can.
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