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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 22, 2016 0:23:19 GMT -5
Going over these last several songs has been useful for me, especially after finally seeing what happened to Gideon. There were a few things in them that I had missed (the evidence that Holly had seen Gideon fall, for example, in "Same kooks can't fly because their wings are clipped" [SK] and "She said words alone never could save us ... She cried and she told us about Jesus" [FN]). It's also helped, by process of elimination, to focus my thinking on the rest of their interaction with the cops. The fact is that there's very little left, just a few details about the trial itself. And unless I'm forgetting something, those details are limited to fragments scattered across just five songs: DLME, HaRRF, 212M, OftC, and KP. The first bit we see is when Holly, appearing under subpoena [SiM], takes the stand *as Holly* (as opposed to her later appearance *as Mary*, when she supplies Charlemagne-in-Gideon with an alibi). This first appearance is described in Don't Let Me Explode. Note that the POV character of DLME is Charlemagne (as shown in the final verses); his presence during her questioning is what lets us know that those questions are an examination on the witness stand, and not an interrogation along the lines of what we see in HSL and SiM. The prosecutor is asking her about Gideon (supposed to be the killer) and Charlemagne (supposed to be the victim); Holly is known to have had a history with Charlemagne before leaving him for Gideon, and they're trying to put together the story. He said what about Los Angeles? She said we never really made it that far west We scored big in Denver and thought it might be best To go hang around in the upper midwest [(liner) to turn around and go back and hang around the upper midwest] The prosecutor tries to clear up where she and Gideon were for the seven years that she was "disappeared" and he was off in "Bay City." He asks about Los Angeles: she denies it (they "never really made it," that is, they never hit the metaphoric "California" big time). She says rather that they had a big score in "Denver" (which is the tipoff that the question is about her and Gideon), and that they thought it was best to hang around the "upper" Midwest. I've mentioned this before, but in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link) Craig has described speed as the defining problem of the Midwest (Knuckles does too, in fact). This comes up a few lines later in the "I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain" line, which the liner notes have as "I hear there's fields of speed in the amber waves of grain"; "upper" Midwest here looks like a double entendre in this sense also. He said what about New Orleans? She said I don't think you understand what that means All those hangers-on, those girls lifting up their shirts when the cameras come on We were trying to stay away from those kind of scenes The prosecutor asks about New Orleans: she denies that too. "Those girls lifting up their shirts when the cameras come on" could be meant to suggest her earlier trip to California doing porn, or Mary's sexual escapades down at the Ambassador when *her own* cameras come on. I think "all those hangers-on" (Skins="bloodsuckers/parasites" [ASD]) makes the latter reading more likely; in fact, Mary's Cheyenne sunrises there, "saw the dawn through a crack in the curtain" [R&T], etc., makes "There is a house in New Orleans / They call the Rising Sun" a pretty likely anchor for "New Orleans" as a metaphor. And we didn't go to Dallas 'Cause Jackie Onassis said that it ain't safe for Catholics yet Think about what they pulled on Kennedy and then think about his security Then think about what they might try to pull on you and me She denies going to Dallas, land of the Cowboy Skins and scoreboard/stadium violence [SPayne, LA, BBreathing, DMLE, C&N], particularly the metal bar beatdown. "Jackie Onassis" appears to be Gideon as "Jack" [Swish, HM] warning that they shouldn't go there: "look at what they did to Charlemagne, and think about what they might do to you and me." "His security" is a nod to Charlemagne's status as Christ: "He shall give his angels charge concerning thee, and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone" [Matt 4:6 / Luke 4:10-11, also referenced in SBS]; and, when Peter cut off the servant's ear to defend him in the garden, "Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?" [Matt 26:53, also referenced in BCrosses, Ambassador]. Saint Barbara, I'm calling your name Don't let me blow up We'll hook it all up I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain [(liner) i hear there's fields of speed in the amber waves of grain] The song cuts to Charlemagne's silent prayer to Holly (as Saint Barbara, analogous to his references to Mary as Saint Theresa [YLHF, SPotC]), begging her to have mercy on him: every question is a land mine (Saint Barbara the patron saint of those who work with land mines), and one wrong answer will finish him. "We'll hook it all up (i.e. with a new source); I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain" sounds like Charlemagne's promise to Sapphire (Sapphire is Holly-in-Mary as foreseen by Mary herself; note the references to Sacramento indicating the presence of Holly) in YS: "Sapphire, if Cheyenne's too small, we'll haul it all back to St. Paul; if St. Paul don't call, we've always got Aberdeen." It's clear that Charlemagne is remembering Holly's desperate need for speed during the car ride, and his own refusal to hook her up [alluded to in SK, A&H, MoC, CatCT, NS, DLME]; now, scared, he's vowing to find her some as a reward if she only won't torpedo him from the stand. Saint Barbara, don't let me explode I can feel the whole scene Starting to corrode When we're fooling around on the frontage roads Charlemagne continues praying: he feels the "stuck between stations" threat of destruction --- her getting wet [SBS], leading to "corrosion" and "rust" --- from when they were trying and failing to get it together in the car, on the frontage roads [MoC]. He asked what happened to Charlemagne She just smiled all polite-like and said something vague She said Charlemagne got caught up in some complicated things Then she wiped at her nose and she winked The prosecutor asks the final question --- what happened to Charlemagne? --- and Holly comes through with the answer Charlemagne had coached Mary to give in the first place: "If they ask about Charlemagne / Be polite and say something vague / Like another lover lost to the restaurant raids" [KP]. This doesn't have to be evidence of Mary's presence; the Narrator was in on the plan, and was with Charlemagne and Mary when they were prepping in the theater [BCamp]; it's just as likely that he passed this coaching on to Holly before she took the stand. More on the trial tomorrow, maybe we can wrap it up in just a day at this point. Thanks for keeping Still Alive Carl in mind in the meantime.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 20, 2016 22:33:47 GMT -5
Picking up where we left off, at the third verse. Having set up the basic problem, the Narrator launches into an illustration of it using three different figures at once, ambiguously: Charlemagne, the poet John Berryman, and Jesus. There's a twofold Biblical allusion here. The first is to Luke 4:9-12: after 40 days fasting in the desert, Jesus was taken up to the pinnacle of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Devil, who tempted him to throw himself down, saying that the angels would rescue him. Layered under this is a second reference to the garden of Gethsemane, when again Jesus has the option to call on "twelve legions of angels" to save him, but goes to the crucifixion instead. (We've seen lots of references to the second episode, in which the Narrator urging a violent response to the Skins is compared to Peter defending Christ with violence [HSL, Ambassador], and there's an apparent reference to both episodes in "think about his security" [DLME]). In both cases, Jesus could use words to save himself, but doesn't. Instead, he dies. So the three illustrations go like this: The Devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together And they ended up on Washington talking to the river He said, "I've surrounded myself with doctors and deep thinkers Their big heads and soft bodies make for lousy lovers" Berryman: realizes that he's become all mind and no body, and a lousy lover. Charlemagne: is also there in spirit but without his body, and, being hung up between Holly and Mary, is also a lousy lover ("Same kooks can't come but they sure do kiss" [SK, etc.]). Jesus: is the Son of God but in a mortal body, in which he's been born because God loved the world; he must die in that body in order to save the world. There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly But he didn't, so he died She said "You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life" And they didn't, so he died Berryman: "that night": "his last night on earth" before suicide (see Finn quote below) Charlemagne: "that night": the night of the crucifixion and car ride Jesus: "that night": the night in the garden of Gethsemane (overlaid on the pinnacle of the Temple) and the crucifixion Berryman: "fly": his leaping from the Washington Street bridge into the Mississippi. Charlemagne: "fly": the attempt to escape [see RH] / his body (inhabited by Gideon) leaping from the water tower ("Same kooks can't fly because their wings are clipped" [SK]). Jesus: "fly": the option to call on the angels and escape / the option to call on the angels and leap from the Temple. Berryman: "words": poet, but being a doctor and deep thinker won't save his life. Charlemagne: "words": rumor of his death, but spreading a rumor alone won't save his life [FN]. Jesus: "words": the power to summon the angels, but his purpose is to die; this won't save his life. Berryman: "died": "stuck" [RH] in the mud of the west bank of the river, between St. Paul and Minneapolis. Charlemagne: "died": crucified / fell from the water tower. Jesus: "died": crucified. Yeah, he was drunk and exhausted, he was critically acclaimed and respected He loved the Golden Gophers but he hated all the drawn-out winters He likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration Most nights were kind of fuzzy but that last night he had total retention The ambiguous parallel between Charlemagne and Berryman continues; Jesus is removed from the picture (but something else is added; see note on this below). Berryman: "drunk and exhausted": he was an alcoholic, in a losing battle with depression (see Finn quote below, and also wikipedia). Charlemagne: "drunk and exhausted": he's been driving around drinking [MoC, SBS, SK, HSL, PP, A&H, R&T] in the car after the crucifixion. Berryman: "critically acclaimed and respected": Pulitzer prize, etc. Charlemagne: "critically acclaimed and respected": Holly's into him now, "cool car makes a guy seem that much cooler" [MoC]. Berryman: "loved the Golden Gophers": taught at the University of Minnesota. Charlemagne: "loved the Golden Gophers": loved Mary, who stayed in the Twin Cities for school, apparently at U Minn; had loved Holly "golden with bar light and beer" [FN]. Berryman: "hated all the drawn-out winters": struggled with depression, and killed himself in January. Charlemagne: "hated all the drawn-out winters": "last winter there was weather, and his eyes they iced right over" [CiS]. Berryman: "warm feeling / dehydration": again, an alcoholic, in a losing battle with depression. Charlemagne: see notes on this line above (yesterday's post). Berryman: "last night he had total retention": see notes on Berryman's "last night on earth" below. Charlemagne: "last night he had total retention": his epiphany and conversion under the hot soft light of the projector. Yeah, these Twin City kisses They sound like clicks and hisses We all come down and drown In the Mississippi River So, the Twin City kiss is the kiss under the water tower, the "complicated" kiss between Mary/Holly (Mary before and Holly after) and Charlemagne/Gideon (Charlemagne's ghost embodied by Gideon's projector). It's a Twin City kiss because the bodies and souls on either side are split in two. It sounds like clicks and hisses because of the noise of the projector. And it's connected to death by drowning in the Mississippi because of Holly/Mary on the one hand (Holly baptized and drowned, and Mary ascending into heaven dripping wet) and Charlemagne/Berryman/Christ on the other (leaping from the bridge into the river, and leaping to death generally). And the Mississippi divides the Twin Cities between which he's stuck, too. We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust We get wet and we corrode and now we're covered up in rust We drink and we dry up and now we crumble into dust We get wet and we corrode and now we're covered up in rust This is a description of Charlemagne-in-Gideon and Holly-in-mary in the car: they're drinking a lot and getting dehydrated; they're fooling around, it's warm and wet, but they're corroding ("I can feel the whole scene starting to corrode / when we're fooling around on the frontage roads" [DLME]). They're crumbling into dust, they're covered up in rust; they're stuck between stations. One more quote from Craig that's useful when looking at this song is the 2015 Spin interview ( link): There's a lot of good stuff here; when Jesus disappears from the Charlemagne/Berryman parallel in that fifth verse, it seems to me that Craig slips himself into it in his place: Craig: "drunk and exhausted": "writing a lot when I was hungover." Craig: "critically acclaimed and respected": obviously true. Craig: "loved the Golden Gophers": example of "my hometown, which I was already prone to singing about a lot." Craig: "hated all the drawn-out winters": likely enough to be true. Craig: "warm feeling / dehydration": "my artistic stuff is drying up." In adding himself in he seems to draw out the lesson of the others' experience: the body and soul are both important; spiritual types like artists (and religious figures) might be inclined to despise the mortality of the body, but the body is as important as the soul. There's a reconciliation to the mortal conditions of art, there. It really is an unbelievable song, so stacked that I feel almost silly trying to tease out the different elements running through it. But I can stop there. Not quite sure what I'm going to take on tomorrow, there are a few things to choose from. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 20, 2016 0:18:57 GMT -5
Any discussion of Stuck Between Stations has to begin with the Kerouac quote that sets the theme for BAGIA: Craig's gloss on the quote in the 2006 Pitchfork interview lays particular emphasis on "souls" ( link): Every song on BAGIA is about this theme (Craig affirms this in several places, for example the 2006 interview for The Fader, link): - Chips Ahoy! is about Mary and Charlemagne having a sad time together in soul but not in body. - Hot Soft Light is (among other things) about Charlemagne finding himself caught in the trap of Holly and Gideon's drug-for-sex exchange, when he thought he was getting together with Mary. - Same Kooks is about Holly and Charlemagne in Mary and Gideon's bodies, respectively, failing to get together. - First Night is about Holly's lament, having tried to get together with Gideon and discovering that he and Charlemagne have switched. - Party Pit is about the Narrator reaching for Mary and not being able to tell whether he's talking to Mary or Holly. - Massive Nights is about the Narrator getting with Mary's body only to learn that her soul is with Charlemagne. - Citrus is about Charlemagne's lament, having tried to get with Mary and discovering that she's Holly. - Southtown Girls is about Charlemagne coming around from Holly to Mary, but still stuck ("two-sided tape it gets way too sticky") between them. And then there's Stuck Between Stations, a major reflection on the theme from the POV of the Narrator. There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together Sucking off each other at the demonstrations, making sure their makeup's straight Crushing one another with colossal expectations, dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late The "I" of the song is limited to reflecting on Kerouac, and later ("we") to reflecting on Berryman; this certainly sounds like the Narrator, and the fact that at least some references to "he" later on appear to refer to Charlemagne tends to confirm this. As we mentioned earlier, this first verse has a ton of material in common with Magazines, and there are other elements that seem to allude to Charlemagne and Jesse; but we could read some of this as referring to the other characters also. It's probably best to read this first verse as building up to universality through ambgiuity: - "There are nights ... sad time together" reminds us that Jesse "isn't always funny in the night" and that "then you'll probably fight" [Magazines]. - "Sucking off each other / making sure their makeup's straight" clearly sounds like Jesse's "Second dates and lipstick tissues" [Magazines]. On the other hand, the Narrator and Mary actually went down on each other at prom [YGD, MN, OWL]. - We don't know what the "demonstrations" are but they probably belong in the rhyming list of "celebrations" and "dedications" where Jesse "gets pretty wasted" [Magazines]. - Jesse and Charlemagne are "crushing one another with colossal expectations," namely the pressures of their respective father/Holly complexes ("I hope you'll still let me kiss you" / "daddy issues" [Magazines]). But there are expectations even more colossal, for example Mary identifying Charlemagne with Christ, or the Narrator identifying Mary with the Queen of Heaven (the double meaning of "crush" appears in MN as well). - "dependent": could be read as referring to Charlemagne and Jesse: "this little tryst is hard to quit, so we just sit here and live with it" [BCig]; but Holly and Gideon are stuck in an even more pernicious pattern of sex-for-drugs co-dependence. - "sleeping late": "She stayed out too late again ... She didn’t go to work again." [40B] She was a really cool kisser and she wasn't all that strict of a Christian She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend He likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration Most nights are crystal clear but tonight it's like he's stuck between stations On the radio The Narrator turns from the general case of BAGIA having a sad time together, to Charlemagne-in-Gideon and Holly-in-Mary specifically. Charlemagne is stuck in the inter-channel static between Mary and Holly, Mary's body and Holly's soul: "She was a really cool kisser and she wasn't all that strict of a Christian": Holly is a really cool kisser; that was a key aspect of her/Charlemagne's virginal relationship as kids [Swish], and this appears again during the car ride: "two kooks can't come but they sure do kiss" [SK]. (Again, all the kissing with Jesse is connected to Charlemagne's projective identification of her with Holly [HH, Magazines, JaJ, HJ].) She's not a very strict Christian, either; she likes the cross because it looks good on her chest [CatCT]. So on the one hand, he's with Holly. "She was a damn good dancer but she wasn't all that great of a girlfriend": Mary is a damn good dancer [HM, YGD, SBS, CA, OWL]; in drawing a picture of her deterioration, even BBlues and RP give evidence of her having once been a dancer. And she hasn't been such a great girlfriend, given that for years she's been pretty much living/sleeping with the Skins, instead of with him. So on the other hand, he's with Mary. "He likes the warm feeling but he's tired of all the dehydration": Charlemagne likes the warm and wet feeling of "teenage heat" [TL] and physical intimacy with Holly ("warm" is a Jesse theme as well [40B, CSongs, TL, JaJ, WCGT, HJ]); he likes the warm feeling of being drunk; at the same time he's tired of the dehydration from so much drinking, apparently wine-drinking in an attempt to recover Mary (see "we drink and we dry up" later [SBS], and again there is car-time evidence for wine and drinking generally in MoC, SBS, SK, HSL, PP, A&H, R&T). "Most nights are crystal clear but tonight it's like he's stuck between stations": Most nights Charlemagne knows where he is, but now he's stuck in the static "Twin City kiss" between the two girls, like two stations on the radio. (There's a long note about "white noise ... between channels" in Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which is definitely referenced in C&N, and possibly also in BCamp.) This is clearly going to run long, so let me stop there and pick up the rest of it tomorrow. There's a lot going on here, plus it's a hell of a song and really deserves the detailed treatment. Thanks for reading along, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 18, 2016 23:34:42 GMT -5
First Night is another great song. Like the rest of BAGIA, it turns on the theme of the characters' sadness as they try to get together, with their bodies going one way and their souls another.
The POV character is the Narrator, by process of elimination; he's describing the time after the crash, having left Holly-in-Mary at Methodist hospital (as described in Almost Everything).
Charlemagne shakes in the streets Gideon makes love to the suites Holly's not invincible, in fact she's in the hospital Not far from the bar where we met on that first night
The Narrator describes Holly's confusion as she struggles to distinguish Charlemagne from Gideon:
- Charlemagne's the one who shakes in the streets, "high as hell and shivering and smashed" [MoC]. - Gideon's the one from the motel suites, "making love" to her as they traveled [CatCT, SN] (Charlemagne, by contrast, isn't really into sex with her now [SK]).
Holly herself is in Methodist hospital (not far from the Uptown bar where the Narrator and Gideon and Mary first met her and Charlemagne [Swish, BBlues]), getting sorted out for her addiction after the crash [AE]. Charlemagne pulls street corner scams Gideon's got a pipe made from a Pringles can Holly's insatiable, she still looks incredible But she don't look like the same girl we met
Again, from Holly's perspective, struggling:
- Charlemagne is the one working the corners [CiS, etc.]. - Gideon's the one with a pipe made from a Pringles can [SK].
Holly is still desperately addicted ("insatiable" cf. "can't get enough" [SPayne]), but now this has an overtone of sexual frustration also [see SK]; unlike before, she wants Charlemagne [MoC, NS], but now it's not her he's into. She still looks incredible, the Narrator notes ("I'm still pretty into you," he says, speaking to her in the hospital, trying to reach Mary underneath [AE]). But she doesn't look like the same girl we (Narrator, Mary, and Gideon) met at that first party so many years ago; it's Holly's spirit, but she's inhabiting Mary's body now.
On that first night She was golden with bar light and beer On that first night She slept like she'd never been scared
On that first night [Swish, BBlues], there was an aura of innocence around the real Holly: she was golden with bar light and beer; in those days, she slept like she'd never been scared (back before the parties got ugly and bloody [HaRRF]).
And then last night She said words alone never could save us And then last night She cried and she told us about Jesus
(So there's something here that I had missed earlier, before buddymo's point about habeas corpus put me on to Gideon's suicide. But now that I'm convinced he switched bodies with Charlemagne and then killed himself, it's pretty clear that there's a darker meaning to these lines.)
And then last night --- like in SBS, "that last night" is the night of the crucifixion and car ride --- Holly said "words alone never could save us," then she cried and told us (the Narrator and Charlemagne) about Jesus. That is, she told them, "Gideon's plan to save us with just a rumor, without evidence of a crime, could never have worked; there had to be a body, and so he (Jesus) killed himself." It would appear from this that she saw Gideon fall (consistent with her OftC reflection "if one townie falls in the forest, does anyone notice?"), and that she might have been the only one who did. It's not clear whether she identifies Jesus with Charlemagne, whose body lay there dead, or with Gideon, who she seems to have understood to be behind the sacrifice.
There's a second reading here per which she's saying that "talking" to Jesus, "talking to the guys with the hot soft eyes," isn't enough for salvation, both in the old sense that he can't hook her up with speed like he (the real Gideon) once did, and in the new sense that he's not really into her sexually; she wants him now, but that isn't happening [NS, MoC, SK, etc.].
Holly's inconsolable Unhinged and uncontrollable Because we can't get as high as we got On that first night
Holly's desperate and out of control (see her state in AE), literally because they can't get as high as they got on that first night [Swish, BBlues]; they're back on the simpler stuff, not speed, and it's no longer working ("dead receptors" [OwtB]).
Boys and girls in America Boys and girls in America Boys and girls in America Boys and girls in America
Don't bother talking to the guys with the hot soft eyes You know they're already taken Don't even speak to all those sequencer and beats boys When they kiss they spit white noise
The Narrator reflects on boys and girls in America, and hears Holly telling them about Jesus: "Don't bother talking to the guys with the hot soft eyes," that is, the seeing-double chemists Charlemagne-in-Gideon (Gideon's eyes "wild eyes" [HSL], "psycho eyes" [Swish], "enlightened eyes" [BCrosses], "said something special / using only his eyes" [BBreathing]); "You know they're already taken," that is, they're in love with Mary and out of reach. "Don't even speak to all those sequencer and beats boys," again Charlemagne-in-Gideon (Gideon the special-effects actor/producer); "When they kiss they spit white noise" --- the kiss in the crucifixion screening, when "it went white" [SS], was the clicks and hisses of the film projector, the static of being stuck between stations.
That's some pretty satisfying songwriting, and enough for tonight. Tomorrow I'll do Stuck Between Stations. Thanks for reading along and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 17, 2016 22:48:15 GMT -5
Writing this stuff up while crashing is not very effective, and I missed a couple of important things about Navy Sheets last night: - "Left home virgins" can't have anything to do with Lynn, MA, because it's followed by "came back vampires" (Charlemagne never goes back to MA). But I'm still pretty sure this is Charlemagne; he and Mary/Holly are the ones who "found out Virginia really is for the lovers" [KP], and both were resurrected (raised from the dead) via the crucifixion. "Everybody wants to suck on something sweet" is clearly a description of Holly in the car time, trying to trade sex for drugs, but it also plays on "vampires"; and of course Charlemagne's with her. - The idea that "I guess we met a couple bona fide angels / But they all seemed kind of fat and fatigued" refers to a couple of cops is confirmed by CSTLN: the Irish cops of Algren's Chicago "seemed tired last night." I think that's better than speculation. I guess we met a couple bona fide angels But they all seemed kind of fat and fatigued And now we're trying to match the mouth to the screams Match the heads with their dreams Charlemagne describes the aftermath of the car crash. Having been picked up for questioning by the cops, he and apparently somebody else were sequestered and interrogated by a pair of them; the cops were kinda fat, and fatigued from "parading every townie in town through the station" with no luck ("no one says nothing and they can't find the weapon" [OftC]), but to the kids they appeared as the two angels [John 20:12] announcing that Jesus' tomb was empty. Exactly how that works isn't clear. Now they're answering questions about what happened that night, and the confusion of their answers isn't entirely feigned: Mary's confused about being either Holly or herself, and about Charlemagne appearing to be Gideon. Charlemagne himself isn't totally sure which of the two girls he's with. - "And now we're trying to match the mouth to the screams": Holly screamed (cf. "There were screams" in the "video" version of the reservoir scene, as seen by Mary [C&N]) - "Match the heads with their dreams": Mary dreamed it (cf. "I swear there must be something in your dreams" foreseeing the reservoir scene [YS]) Everybody's searching out the softest seat All dolled up for the funeral feast Everybody's stabbing at the biggest piece Clever kids kissing on a bleak retreat In the confusion of bodies and souls, Charlemagne-in-Gideon is "everybody" (cf. "all those sequencer and beats boys" [FN], or on Holly's side "multitude" [MoC]): - "Everybody's searching out the softest seat": I think this is a referece to Charlemagne trying to fit the role of Gideon (Gideon=soft [Knuckles, SN, MPADJs, HSL, etc.]; compare the reference to the rest of the audience that night in "stadium seating" [SA]) - "All dolled up for the funeral feast": they're all in disguise, Charlemagne-as-Gideon, Mary-as-Holly, in jeans and fringes and feathers [SS], for the crucifixion scene - "Everybody's stabbing at the biggest piece": Charlemagne-as-Gideon stabbed at the ghost-of-Charlemagne image - "Clever kids kissing on a bleak retreat": The "complicated kisses" [SK] of Mary/Holly and the ghost-of-Charlemagne, in the bleakness of Swede Hollow (the Party Pit) Now I'm not really sure we were lovers Or if it was just some kind of car crash Now we're trying to find a DNA match To match the heads to their hats Charlemagne isn't really sure what happened after "it went white" [SS]; in particular, he's not really sure, despite the "complicated kisses" [SK], and perhaps because he couldn't take it all the way [SK], that he and Holly-in-Mary were lovers ("the night with the fight and the butterfly knife was the first night she spent with that one guy she liked" [OftC], but "if she says we partied, I'm pretty sure we partied, I really don't remember; I remember we departed from our bodies" [KP]); what he vaguely remembers is the car crash ("sped through the scene until the engine stalled at some suburban shopping mall" [PP]). Now that they've departed from their bodies, with Charlemagne in Gideon's body and Holly in Mary's, they're literally trying to match up the actual underlying kids with their physical appearances (the heads to their hats). Everybody's reaching for the sharpest knife Legs wide open on the opening night Everybody's bathing in the laser lights Clever kids screwing with some new device More memories of confusion at the crucifixion: - "Everybody's reaching for the sharpest knife": Charlemagne as Gideon wields the knife [OftC] for striking the ghost-of-Charlemagne image. - "Legs wide open on the opening night": the "screening" of the crucifixion film is described in analogy to the film Opening Night [SA]; it was the "first night she spent with that one guy she liked" [OftC], only he didn't consummate [SK]. Holly has come to, wants drugs, and, seeing "Gideon" before her, opens her legs for their old exchange. - "Everybody's bathing in the laser lights": They're all bathed in the lights of Gideon's special effects. - "Clever kids screwing with some new device": Gideon has built a Pringles-can projector to project the image of Charlemagne's ghost from the top of the water tower onto the clearing below. Sunday morning, sidewalks splattered Feverish in stylish tatters Didn't this used to seem like glamour? I remember when it mattered Can't get over what's transpired Left home virgins, came back vampires Belt it out like back scratch choirs We're either dead or really tired He goes on to describe the immediate aftermath of the car crash, when the sun came up on Sunday morning: the sidewalks were splattered with Mary's blood (from stigmata, rather than injuries); she was feverish with withdrawal symptoms and general ill health, wearing the tatters of her Indian fringes outfit [SS]. He remembers the time when all this seemed glamourous, the time when it mattered. He can't believe everything that's happened since then, how they left home virgins (could be a reference to Charlemagne and Holly early on, or more likely to Charlemagne and Mary prior to the crucifixion, per "Virginia really is for the lovers" [KP]) but came back vampires (of course they've been in disguise among the vampire Skins at the saddle shop and then the Party Pit [SS]; more specifically, Charlemagne and Holly have come back from the not-quite-dead, like vampires, and she, drug-seeking, is looking to "suck on something sweet"). They can "belt it out like back scratch choirs," unnaturally rising again ("text scratched into her lower back ... Damn right you'll rise again" [YLHF]); but they're either dead, or really tired (this last is an allusion to Gideon appearing to never sleep during the last 16 days prior to this point [Knuckles, R&T, TL, OftC, SS, NS]). "Sunday morning": this is probably Separation Sunday --- the kids crash into the mall, with Holly-in-Mary at the wheel; Charlemage might have separated from them by the end, but at any rate he was there at the beginning ("we met him at some suburban St. Paul mall" [CSTLN]) and then he was gone ("So we walked across that Grain Belt bridge" [PP]). This is the only explicitly "Sunday" candidate in the canon. There might be something else after a Saturday/Sabbath, or unnamed, but this is it for Sunday. Everybody's coming onto navy sheets Everybody's coming onto navy sheets Everybody wants to suck on something sweet Everybody's coming onto navy sheets He closes with two more statements about "everybody" in the crew, and the transition from virgins to vampires: - "Everybody's coming onto navy sheets": a search of bedding at online department stores confirms that navy is the darkest of the typically available colors (sometimes you see black, but navy is a standard offering). During this interim, Charlemagne-as-Gideon and Mary-as-Holly are constantly keeping after the bloodstains of Mary's stigmata to protect their true identities ("the Wild West begins right where your body ends, so keep your bandages clean" [SS]; "He's bleaching out the blood stains" [GLS] from the bandages, or from her white clothing; "The sheets stain but the sins wash away" [SK]). The dark sheets are meant to hide the blood while they try to blend in with the Skins, sleeping together but not touching. - "Everybody wants to suck on something sweet": They're all vampires in the sense of being drug-addicted, too; Holly wants to trade sex for drugs like in MM, but it's not working for Charlemagne, and she's not getting speed out of it, either. OK. The questions are still open, but at any rate we've got the song broken down. I found something else today ... at lunch I was reading the Flood interview with Craig from October 2015 ( link), where he talks about Joan Didion's book Democracy: as a highlight, he mentions that the book includes So RFK is definitely something that's been on Craig's mind; I think that's further evidence that the Ambassador link to RFK is a good one. (In fact, the later PJ line: "some Kennedy OD'd while we watched on MTV" has to be an echo of Didion's "watching Robert Kennedy getting shot on TV" as described by Craig here.) More props to hitchhiker. I need to do at least Stuck Between Stations and First Night before moving on to the trial, so maybe I'll give one of them a shot tomorrow. Both are a lot clearer than Navy Sheets, so that should make for more interesting reading. Thanks still for hanging in there, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 16, 2016 22:42:57 GMT -5
Had a little aha today about Constructive Summer, specifically that opening couple of lines:
Me and my friends are like The drums on "Lust for Life"
The song is about the Narrator and Charlemagne and Gideon "[putting] it back together" after having fallen out years back. The metaphor here is that the two beats of the drums on Lust for Life start out on the same pulse, then fall out of sync before finally coming together again. Made me happy when it hit me.
I said I'd get into Navy Sheets, but it's a bit of a mess and I think I'm too tired tonight to do the whole thing. Let me just set out the difficult passages as kind of a problem statement for tomorrow, and leave it at that.
I think "I'm not really sure we were lovers / Or if it was just some kind of car crash" makes Charlemagne the POV character (via the apparently obvious reference to the situation with Charlemagne and Holly in the car time). "Left home virgins" too points to Charlemagne, since he's the only one of the three guys who left someplace (Lynn, MA) to come to the Twin Cities.
But if that's right, it makes "I guess we met a couple bona fide angels" difficult. It seems clear to me that this is an allusion to the cops who, kinda fat, and fatigued from "parading every townie in town through the station" with no luck ("no one says nothing and they can't find the weapon" [OftC]), appeared to the kids as the two angels [John 20:12] announcing that Jesus' tomb was empty. But then, how could they announce to Charlemagne himself that he was not in his tomb? Also, how did Charlemagne go to the cops as part of a "we" --- who was with him?
The other thing that's really difficult are the "navy sheets" themselves. Navy is usually the darkest color in which bedding and is available, so that's the color the kids would use if they were trying to conceal the bleeding of Mary's hands. Maybe, possibly, this is something they actually did during the final two weeks among the Skins, when they split a bed (compare AHfA "sleeping on your couch"), but couldn't touch (hence "everybody's coming" on the sheets). But "Everybody wants to suck on something sweet" seems distinctly to belong to Holly in the car time. The only alternative I can (barely) think of is that "navy" has something to do with the cops themselves, in their navy-colored uniforms.
I can't keep my eyes open. Sorry for the very short post but I have to sleep. Any thoughts or suggestions about the above gratefully received. Thanks for reading along and thank you for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 15, 2016 23:57:12 GMT -5
So let's get back to Charlemagne. To review what I *think* happened between the car crash and his interrogation by the cops:
1. The car crashed; Holly (in Mary's body) got out of the car and wandered into the mall; Charlemagne (in Gideon's body) got out, traumatized by the "I've had kisses that made Judas seem sincere" experience, and took off. (Basing this mainly on the fact that he's not with the Narrator and Holly-in-Mary when they get picked up, the possibility of "a couple bona fide angels" reporting the equivalent of an empty tomb [NS], and my conclusion that the day of the crash is the best and probably only fit for "Separation Sunday.")
2. "I got stopped by the cops, and they found it in my socks, and I got probed" [YLHF]; probed meaning "questioned" in this case. We know that Charlemagne was in the car with something in his socks thanks to CiS: "We had a gun in the glove box, we had some sweet stuff tucked into our socks, and Jesus Christ in all His glory" [CiS].
Was there something between 1 and 2? The cops found the body of Gideon-in-Charlemagne? Holly identified Charlemagne-in-Gideon in photos? Or maybe she identified the body ...? that's a possibility I hadn't thought of. Still struggling with this part ...
Anyway, Hot Soft Light is clearly Charlemagne-in-Gideon under interrogation. The voice is the voice of Gideon, responding to questions with a nonstop barrage of apparent insanities in the style of Knuckles (and if the statement that begins "Hi, my name's Corey" [HM] isn't excerpted from this same interrogation, it's at any rate part of the same "story"). But, as usual with this kind of thing, we can read the truth under the insanities.
I was not involved up at the Northtown mall As a matter of fact I didn't even know that that's where it happened I was France Ave when they came out dancing, I was Lyndale South, I was kicking it with cousins We were talking about going clubbing but instead we just started drinking
Charlemagne-in-Gideon denies being involved in the crash up at the HarMar mall, promptly demonstrating the "truth" of his statement by naming the wrong mall but appearing to have let it slip by accident.
He then describes himself traveling east along Lake Street, like Gideon "the cowboy on the crosstown bus" --- taking the 17 from the Cityscape Apartments past France Ave South, the Minneapolis border, into Uptown, then switching to the 21 and heading further east; later he'll get as far as Lake and Columbus.
He protests that he was at France Ave and Lake "when they came out dancing": apparently a reference to the Skins dancing at the Party Pit ("that one kid in camouflage dancing" [SS]). Per the "Cheyenne" metaphor, France Ave is where the Wild West begins; it looks like this is supposed to correspond to the Skins in Western wear in the Pit [SS].
Then he was at Lyndale South and Lake "kicking it with cousins" Holly-in-Mary, just like she was "kicking it with chemists" (him! [SK]); a true statement as far as it goes, but impenetrable, plus "cousins" sounds like a ridiculous boast. Lyndale and Lake is the center of the Skins' "silver metal flake" trade [R&T]; it looks like this is supposed to correspond to Holly trying to get him to cough up the meth in the car.
He and "the cousins" were talking about going clubbing, but instead just started drinking; the grain of truth here was that she was asking him for meth ("club" as in the Ambassador), but instead they kept drinking (car-time evidence for wine and drinking generally is in MoC, SBS, SK, HSL, PP, A&H, R&T).
I've been straight since the Cinco de Mayo But before that I was blotto, I was blacked out I was cracked out, I was caved in You should have seen all these portals that I've powered up in
He claims to have been straight since the Cinco de Mayo; the underlying truth here is that Gideon has been straight since his touchdown in "Houston" [RH, Ambassador]. The Cinco de Mayo reference, besides being funny and a really nice touch, could mean a few things. The Houston area is ground zero of Cinco de Mayo celebration in the US, maybe that's intentional. It's also possible that it's the literal date of Gideon's return to sanity. I had been thinking that the "Easter mass" of the crucifixion was really set on April 11, 2004, and that other dates that didn't fit with that had to be metaphorical. Now, after having been over much of the evidence in writing, including a couple of references to "summer," I'm thinking that it's the Easter date that has to be metaphorical. (I'm realizing, too, that drinking until blackout in a park in Minnesota probably can't happen in early April, no matter what.) Which means that May 5 could be a realistic date for Gideon's touchdown.
Before that, he was out of his mind; "blacked out" is used of the Skins at the reservoir party [OftC, SS]; "cracked out / caved in" echoes "Kids on the corner are cracking and caving in / Turning over and turning other kids in" [HM]; but that was then; now, they're not getting anything out of him.
We hear of two "portals" where Gideon "powered up":
The first, referenced in the lines above, is the "vestibule" [RH] where he saw Charlemagne left to bleed to death before he got jumped in and lost his mind [YGD].
The second, referenced several times in the lines below, is the entrance "by the coat check" [Weekenders] where he was camped out until Holly joined him, and they got Rocky Mountain High together.
We started recreational It ended kinda medical It came on hot and soft And then it tightened up its tentacles
Charlemagne generalizes, truthfully but unhelpfully, about how things got to this point: what was recreational drug use at first led to a variety of medically bad outcomes.
The most obvious interpretation of these lines is signaled by "tentacles": the thing that came on hot and soft was speed, most memorably via Gideon ("soft" [MPADJs, SN, and by implication Knuckles]; "hot" [A&H, FN]) at Holly's party; then it tightened up its tentacles, evoking the Skins as "the bloodsuckers and the parasites ... they hitch onto their host" [ASD].
But Gideon, Charlemagne, and Holly have all taken individual trips from recreational to medical by this point in the story, and all of these seem to be alluded to in the course of this song. See the list beneath the "vestibule / hospital" lines below.
I wasn't there I was blind, high, I was scared I was lake and Columbus, I was cutting off all my hair I was unfurling a flag of defiance aimed at my guidance guy
Back to the present and the question of the mall crash: Charlemagne-in-Gideon insists again that he wasn't there, and goes on to list a series of other things that he was doing, all true but elliptical accounts of recent events.
He was "blind, high, and scared": the St. Paul road-to-Damascus moment when he was blinded and terrified, and in that moment converted: the old Charlemagne was dead, and he was resurrected / born again as Gideon.
He was "Lake and Columbus, I was cutting off all my hair": this is Gideon's apartment on Columbus Avenue, where Charlemagne had been staying [CF, alluded to in Ambassador, SPayne], and where he got his head shaved [RH].
He was "unfurling a flag of defiance aimed at my guidance guy" until the hot-soft-light moment of conversion, like St. Paul defying Jesus until the road to Damascus (see "I only bow down to the jetset" [ABlues]).
So this is it This is the end of the session I ain't gonna be taking any more questions I think my attorney's gonna second that notion
Here Charlemagne's story is revealed to be the response to a police interrogation (compare the Narrator in SiM: "I'm getting pretty sick of this interview"); but there are holes in it [HM] --- maybe specifically the "hole" in his own dead body [A&H] --- and he's not going to get off that easy.
The band played screaming for vengeance And we agreed, this world is mostly manacled It started ice cream social nice It ended up all white and ecumenical
He returns to a description of the crucifixion:
The Narrator ("Peter" here, wanting to strike back against the Skins [BCrosses], see below) advocated that they "take them by surprise" [Ambassador] for "Revenge" [C&N], but they agree instead to restrain themselves, that vengeance is not for this world.
The crucifixion party itself started "ice cream social nice" (see the "Ice Cream Castles" [A&H] and "parties they start lovely" [HaRRF] descriptions of the same event); but it ended up "all white and ecumenical": "and then it went white" [SS] in the light of the conversion of St. Paul; "ecumenical": St Paul is the figure whom Christ chose to preach the gospel to the ecumene/oikoumene, the inhabited world --- in this case, to spread the legend of Charlemagne's death, and the gospel of the Unified Scene.
There are guys, there are guys, there are guys, there are guys With wild eyes when they ask to get you high There are girls, there are girls, there are girls, there are girls That will come to you with comfort in the night
He makes another allusion to Holly's party, this one more explicit:
Gideon, with his "wild eyes" [HSL] ("psycho eyes" [Swish], "enlightened eyes" [BCrosses], "hot soft eyes" [FN], "said something special / using only his eyes" [BBreathing]), offered to get Holly high (see also the baptism incident, where he offered "high as hell and born again" [BCamp]). Holly, in exchange, brought Gideon "comfort in the night" [MM].
This is the "Boys and Girls in America" bodies versus souls theme as viewed through this song: Charlemagne, being Gideon only in body, couldn't get her high; Holly, being Mary only in body, couldn't bring him comfort [SK, SBS, etc.].
The band played sabbath bloody sabbath You thought it was stoney and adorable It started in the vestibule It ended in the hospital
He remembers the Narrator's proposal for revenge ("Sabbath Bloody Sabbath," which also puts the crucifixion on a Saturday night [NS, CSTLN, HSL]) again, and how "you" (which must be Mary) thought it was "stoney and adorable." The poor Narrator is getting the sweet-guy brushoff, see "Hey Peter, you've been pretty sweet since Easter break" [BCrosses]; "stoney" is a pun on "Peter" (the "rock" on which Christ would build his church).
He notes again that "It started in the vestibule [and] ended in the hospital": with this he could be referring to any or all of the following episodes: - Charlemagne: from metal bar vestibule ("left to bleed to death" [RH]) to hospital ("the ER" [SN]) - Gideon: from metal bar vestibule ("lost his mind when they jumped him in" [YGD, RH]) to hospital ("some hospital" [RH]) - Holly-in-Mary: from mall vestibule ("a scene by the revolving door" [PP]) to hospital ("in fact she's in the hospital" [FN]) - Holly: from vestibule of her house ("in the corner" [CiS] by the "coat check" [Weekenders, MM, HF]) to her baptismal death [CatCT, BCamp] and eventual recovery in the "hospital" [FN].
There are nights, there are nights, there are nights, there are nights Where it all comes on a little bit too bright There's a cross, there's a cross, there's a cross, there's a cross And in the center there is a hot soft light
He concludes with a final description of the night of the crucifixion, the bright light of the projector, and his own conversion.
I guess there were only a few minor things in there that we hadn't already been over, but it's good to get it all in one place, and I really need to be thorough now. Navy Sheets is another song that's a mess, but that's a good place to find something unexpected, maybe we give that a shot tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 14, 2016 23:54:31 GMT -5
Oh man, that is an awesome catch about the Ambassador ... I never even thought to look it up, but that's 100% an intentional thing --- the Positive Jam framing of the metal bar beatdown is
Some Kennedys got shot while you were screwing San Francisco
So I don't think I ever said this explicitly, but Positive Jam is a mosaic of bits and pieces from the story, chipped out of place and reassembled as an eight-decade retrospective of 20th century America. I was going to go over it after everything else is done, but you've given me an excuse to do it now (plus it'll give me a break from all this end-times shit that's making me cross-eyed). It's a brilliant song, pretty much the cherry on top of Craig's claim to a spot in the American canon, and the fact that it comes at the beginning and not the end is just extra sweet.
Here's how I see it breaking down. It's not a retelling of the story, as such --- the pieces are out of order, among other things --- but all the pieces are recognizable:
Woke up in the '20s and there were flappers and fruits in white suits It was right before the crash, we got thrashed throughout the '30s Queuing up for soup with scabby sores Then they sent us off to war
- "Woke up": the beginning of the story in the Nicollet & 66th period (1990's). - "flappers": jumped-in Gideon: "It had the flaps on the back that kept the sun off his neck" [HM]. - "fruits in white suits": the Barfruit of the "first night" party; Mary in her "tight white rayon slacks" [Swish].
- "the crash": the car crash at the HarMar mall
- "soup": "maybe we could get some soup together" [212M]. - "scabby sores": Holly with herpes: "I did a couple favors for some guys that looked like Tusken Raiders" [Swish].
- "war": the cops vs. Skins: "we got war going down in the Middle West" [Knuckles]
We came back in the '40s and there were wheelchairs, guns and tickertape We poured it on the floor and we made love to the interstates We got shiftless in the '50s, holding hands and going steady Twisting into dark parts of the large midwestern cities
- "came back": the resumption of the story in the Hennepin period (2000's) - "wheelchairs": Mary's cherubim (from Ezekiel): "Everything sparkles and it feels like we're on wheels" [TSPotC] - "guns": "we had a gun in the glovebox" [CiS] - "tickertape": "you're up to your neck in the sweat and wet confetti" [MPADJs]
- "poured it on the floor": the darkening party picture, "bleeding on the floor" [SM] - "made love to the interstates": the car time, crucifixion cruise; "like a hawk out on the highways ... getting with her little hoodrat friend" [MoC].
- "shiftless": "when you can't get your car off the curb" [TSPotC]. - "holding hands and going steady": Charlemagne and Mary's virginal love.
- "twisting": "my one friend got two girls in a twist" [YGD]. - "dark parts of the large midwestern cities": "It was dark along the edges of the city" [SM]
Tripped right through the '60s with some blissful little hippie Some Kennedys got shot while you were screwing San Francisco And the '70s got heavy, we woke up on bloody carpets Got tangled up in gaslines, and I guess that's where it started
- "Tripped ... blissful little hippie": either Mary at the metal bar "sailing off with cherubim" [SPayne], or maybe "So we sailed off on some separate trips" [PP].
- "Some Kennedys got shot while you were screwing San Francisco": Charlemagne and the Narrator getting beat up, and Gideon getting jumped in, while Mary was fucking the Skins (San Francisco was the first reported stigmatic of the Church).
- "heavy": the metal bar; "heavy" in MPADJs and HH, and especially the implicit "heavy" behind "sketchy" [SM] - "bloody carpets": the metal bar; "blood on the carpet" [OwtB].
- "tangled up in gaslines": "the nitrous tanks ... take a hit" [BCamp]. - "started": Holly was the first of the deaths
The '80s almost killed me, let's not recall them quite so fondly Some Kennedy OD'ed while we watched on MTV And in the '90s we were wired and well connected Put it all down on technology and lost everything we invested
- "almost killed me": the metal bar beatdown, again; "where were you when ... they almost killed me" [BBreathing] - "let's not recall them quite so fondly": "don't recall it all that fondly" [Swish]
- "Some Kennedy OD'd": could be Holly drowning, but I am more inclined to map it to Mary "awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet" [A&H]. - "watched on MTV": watched Mary's visions.
- "wired and well connected": Mary's visionary power: "I'm so well connected / My UPC is dialed into the system" [Swish].
- "put it all down on technology": the big gamble of Gideon's projector ploy. - "and lost everything we invested": Charlemagne pulled off the crucifixion, but lost Mary in the process.
Again, hats off for the Ambassador catch. Funny how I have to keep reminding myself that Craig doesn't waste words, that when something like that shows up there's got to be a reason for it. Really good stuff.
I'm crashing here, so let me pick it up with HSL tomorrow. Thanks for reading along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 13, 2016 22:36:46 GMT -5
Thank you laurenjean! that means a lot, for real.
Muzzle, that's a great catch --- I just checked the Stay Positive liner notes and you're right, it's two sentences with a period between. I still don't know what the second question is. But that should make it easier to come up with a solid guess at it.
Rewinding for a minute from Almost Everything to Party Pit, we get a brief view of the Narrator and Holly-in-Mary traveling between the police station and Methodist Hospital. (Having the context of the whole song is useful for what comes at the end, so I'll start from the beginning; PP isn't nearly as "elliptical" as CSTLN, so this will be shorter.)
Again, the POV character is the Narrator, speaking in first person, talking about Mary. (Who "she"/"her" refers to when he gets to the post-crucifixion has to be asked carefully, but I think the answers are pretty clear in each case; see below.)
I guess I met her at the party pit She said those kids she's with were selling it So we sailed off on some separate trips She got pinned down at the party pit
Again, this is back in high school. The first two lines describe their meeting in summer 1988.
The last two lines describe their separate trips at prom in spring 1989, and her letting him go to return to the Party Pit scene as described in ASD.
I went away to school that fall She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls Sped through the scene until the engine stalled At some suburban shopping mall
The first two lines describe his departure for school in Boston in fall 1989, while she sticks around for school locally (apparently U Minn), in order to stay close to the Party Pit and the townies.
The next two lines look forward fifteen years to 2004, when she crashes the car into the HarMar mall entrance. There isn't any difficulty with who "she" is at that point; it's Holly, in Mary's body, behind the wheel.
I came back to start a band, of course Saw her walking through the crystal court She made a scene by the revolving doors She's gonna walk around and drink some more
The first line resumes from where the the high school story left off, picking things up in spring 1993; the Narrator comes back to the Twin Cities to start a band.
The last three lines take us forward to the crash in 2004. The Narrator saw her walking through the mall ("they found me in a florist" [SK], etc.), where she'd come for the "crystal," after crashing the car through the entrance ("crashing through the vestibule" [CC], etc.).
And when he caught up to her, she said "I'm gonna walk around and drink some more" (again, there's lots of evidence that they've been drinking throughout the car time [MoC, SBS, SK, HSL, PP, A&H, R&T]). In view of what follows in AE, I think this has to be Holly's voice speaking, in a state of almost mindless detachment, or avoidance of her situation; more on this below.
So we walked across that grain belt bridge Into bright new Minneapolis
It seems clear to me that this describes the two of them walking back from the police station, after they've managed to get through their sequestered interrogation and have been let go (with a subpoena).
They're walking because they have no car at this point.
They're crossing the Grain Belt bridge because they've come from a police station in the vicinity of the HarMar mall, and are heading back toward Methodist Hospital (with maybe a stop at the place on Hennepin en route). That route is pretty much a straight shot west on Larpenteur Avenue, over the Grain Belt bridge, west on Hennepin to the intersection with Lake Street in Uptown, and then west on Lake to Methodist Hospital. They're going to Methodist because the Narrator needs his meds, and because Holly/Mary is a total wreck and needs to get cleaned up [AE].
This journey back to Hennepin/Methodist is the same walk referred to in "walk on back" [HaRRF]. More on this in a minute.
It's "bright new Minneapolis" because Holly hasn't seen Minneapolis since her baptism in 1997, seven years earlier.
She said I think that all those things I did Were just momentum from the party pit
Now we get to something more complicated: "She said I think that all those things I did / Were just momentum from the party pit." The implication is that she says this to the Narrator as they're walking back together.
There could be some doubt about who "she" is, given that the Narrator made a connection with Mary during their sequestration. But to my mind, "won't you show me a sign / if I'm getting through to you" [AE], coming shortly after this, excludes Mary as the speaker. This must be Holly's voice.
On the other hand, the statement rings true whether we understand it as coming from Holly or from Mary. I think that's how the Narrator hears it, and how we're supposed to hear it, too.
Coming from Holly, in a wrecked state and barely in control of herself (as shown in her conditioned response to "Gideon," and in the car crash), it sounds like a dull attempt to blame everything on some original cause in the Party Pit. (There's an echo of "the chick blamed the snake" [CatCT] here, and we've already noticed the Party Pit being compared to Garden of Eden.)
Coming from Mary, there's a clear sense in which her whole "sped through the scene" arc *is* literally momentum from that first vision in 1988, when "she got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River" [SN], i.e. in the Party Pit.
The Narrator takes it on the chin both ways. On the one hand, all he can get is Holly's mumbled distancing of herself from what's happened; despite trying to get through to Mary, he can't reach her. On the other, he more than anyone is aware that Mary has been on this arc since before they met, since her first high in the Party Pit. He knows it, and has suffered for it.
There's one more line we haven't covered:
And I'm pretty sure we kissed
Seeing all the stuff about high school at the beginning of the song, we might understand this line as referring back to "we kissed in your car" [MN] on prom night. But I don't think that's what's going on here. To fill in the gaps, we should take a brief look at HaRRF, where, thanks to the link between "walked across that Grain Belt bridge" [PP] and "walk on back" [HaRRF], we can connect in something else Holly says at the same time.
Halleluiah was a hoodrat, and now you finally know that She's been disappeared for years, today she finally came back
Walk on back, walk on back
She said don't turn me on again I'd probably just go and get myself all gone again Halleluiah was a sexy mess, she looked strung out but experienced So we all got kind of curious
Walk on back...
Coming from Holly, this sounds like another attempt to distance herself from what's going on. We can understand "don't turn me on again" to mean that she doesn't want to get high again, because she doesn't want to die again (as if she's finally absorbed the warnings of HF and CatCT).
Coming from Mary, the words would have a different meaning. In 212M we hear about her getting "turned on":
I stayed out till dawn at some raunchy magazine launch And I hit the open bar and got myself all turned on
which is pretty clearly a reference to hitting the open bar at the metal bar the night that Charlemagne was beaten, where she stayed up till dawn "sailing off with cherubim" [SPayne]. ("Magazine" here is a bit of sand in the gears; it could be a metaphor for her visions, except that those are pretty much always described with moving media, radio or video; but everything else fits so tightly that I don't see an alternative. It would be nice to have a better interpretation.)
So either Holly or Mary could be saying this. But in either case the question is, *why* does she say it?
The Narrator has followed Mary for years now, all the way down to the very end. He's been there in the dark hour with the cops, and he's finally outlasted Charlemagne. Now they're standing on the Grain Belt bridge, looking at bright new Minneapolis. Things are bleak, but he knows she's still in there somewhere; maybe there's still a little bit of hope. So he tries, one last time, to kiss her.
That's when she tells him, "don't turn me on again; I'd probably just go and get myself all gone again."
And what can he do with that? It's something that Mary *could* say; it could even be a pointed reference to their prom night experience. Or it could just be Holly, detached and withdrawing. There's no way for him to know. All he knows is that he's been rebuffed; all he can say is that he's "pretty sure we kissed" [PP].
"Halleluiah was a sexy mess, she looked strung out but experienced / So we all got kind of curious" seems to hint at something like this happening, too --- the Narrator putting a brave face on the end of his hopes, and pretending to have been merely "curious." I'm not sure that's the right reading; but there don't seem to be cases of the characters wondering about their chances with her after this.
In short, that "Gonna walk around and drink some more," even though it sounds like an anthem, is really a heartbreaker. It marks the moment when the Narrator, having hung on all these years for a last chance, searches for Mary in the rubble only to find she's really gone.
I think the next thing to do is to go through Charlemagne's interrogation and then the trial. I'll think about it overnight but if I don't come up with a better tack I'll probably pick it up with Hot Soft Light. Thanks for hanging in there and for thinking of Still Alive Carl too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 12, 2016 22:31:56 GMT -5
Yesterday I noted the Narrator's statement that the cops "tried to separate our girls from our guys" [CSTLN], and pointed out that this separation is the literal meaning of being "sequestered" in Memphis. The Narrator-as-the-new-kid and Holly-in-Mary have been hauled to the police station and stuck in separate rooms for questioning.
But that "tried" is odd. It doesn't say that the cops tried to find an inconsistency in their stories, though they did that too. It says that they "tried to separate" them. Even though they did actually sequester them in different rooms. So what's the meaning of "tried" in that case?
The meaning is that they were still connected, even after being physically separated from one another.
In Almost Everything, the Narrator addresses Mary after their release from the station, and after he's brought her to the hospital (this is Holly-in-Mary --- see "Holly's not invincible, in fact she's in the hospital" [FN] --- but he's talking to Mary underneath):
Something might happen but nothing will be never ending. Right from the start I told you I can't spend the night.
As the Narrator clarifies a little further down, they're in the hospital: "We checked into Methodist. / We met with some residents. / They maxed out my medicine. / And let me back loose again." He's got his medicine and is free to go, but they're going to keep her there until she gets through detox. These opening lines are him telling her that he's about to leave.
Forget all the feelings. Remember the sessions. How we made a connection.
Here is where we're told about their sequestration. From Hot Soft Light ("So this is it / This is the end of the session / I ain't gonna be taking any more questions" [HSL]), we get confirmation that "session" means an interrogation session. The Narrator is telling her to forget her fears and other feelings, and remember instead how they made a connection while they were being held apart. The implication --- and some explanation for their getting away with it is required, under the circumstances --- is that it was this connection that made it possible for them to get through the questions without contradicting each others' stories, so that they were allowed to leave.
With the lambs from my dreams looking up at your hands. And your hands pointing up at the lights.
The Narrator specifies that the connection was through their dreams, a statement he makes elsewhere as well [TOT]:
The only thing that tethers us together Is the thing that most matters at the end of the night. Ashes to ashes and dust in the spotlight. ... The only thing that tethers us together Are these dreams.
This "spotlight" [TOT] is the same as the "spotlight" of SA and the "lights" of AE: it's the vision of Mary's bleeding hands reaching up to the light from heaven, dovetailing with the Narrator's own dream of "when the lights come up" [AE] with the "little lambs looking up at me" [MPADJs].
He's tried to explain to her before about his dream of the Unified Scene, and her connection to it [OWL, MN, SPositive, MPADJs, plus a half-mention in SPayne]. Now the image from his dream has become real, just like the images from her vision became real, in the moment of the crucifixion; "she saw the nails and she saw the hands" of Both Crosses also refer to her "hands pointing up at the lights" [AE].
Yeah, there are nights I get terrified. I'm sure you get terrified too. So hey won't you show me a sign If I'm getting through to you. I'm still pretty into you.
Even though she's outwardly Holly now, the Narrator has connected with Mary; he knows she's in there, somewhere. But there are no outward signs of her presence, and no response.
All of this part I'm sure about. Some of the connecting tissue around it is shakier, but I'll keep rolling that out tomorrow. Thanks for reading along in the meantime, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 11, 2016 22:46:04 GMT -5
Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night has more information about the Narrator-as-the-new-kid and Holly-in-Mary under interrogation. We covered the first two verses and some other bits already, but it's an amazing song and it's good to get it all in one place.
The POV character is the Narrator (there's the "We" analogy with Paddy of Dillinger Four, the summer 1988 encounter with Gideon, and he "almost got sick" when Mary kissed Charlemagne) ...
Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the dead end alley Yeah, he told him what to celebrate And I met William Butler Yeats, Sunday night dance party, summer 1988 At first I thought it might be William Blake
The Narrator (speaking from a later time, having left the Twin Cities to come to New York) begins by recalling that the spirit of Nelson Algren came to Paddy of Dillinger Four at a party at the Dead End Alley, and told him what to celebrate. This frames the key idea of the song: being in a band is an apostolic office; you receive the gospel ("came to Paddy ... told him"), and you spread it ("what to celebrate"). The Narrator, too, has been called by the Spirit (Gideon=Holy Ghost [SM, BCamp, A&H, etc.]): he met Gideon at a Youth of Today show at the 7th Street Entry "Sunday Night Dance Party" in the summer of 1988 (the liner notes have "YOT??" here; the same Youth of Today show is described in BBreathing).
At first he thought Gideon's gospel might be the "violent red visions" of William Blake's Revelation [CatCT], a war of revenge on the Skins ("war" [CatCT vs. Knuckles, GLS], "revenge" [C&N, Ambassador], "vengeance" [HSL]); instead, it turned out to be the myth-mixing of William Butler Yeats (compare the BBreathing account of the same show: there too, on his second encounter, the Narrator receives a surprising message, not of violence, but of peace, and the "blue guy" is not only Krishna as preached by the Shelter singer, but also the ghost of Charlemagne as described by Gideon formulating his gospel).
This William Blake / William Butler Yeats double-take is analogous to the one described in Knuckles: Gideon's been trying to get everyone to call him tough guy names, e.g. "Freddy Knuckles," but instead they keep pegging him as a softie, e.g. "Right Said Fred." And again, he's named Gideon after the Biblical judge, who defeated a vastly more numerous enemy without violence, using only the special effects of sound and light.
We mix our own mythologies, we push them out through PA systems We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen And I'm not saying we could save you, but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself If you don't get born again at least you'll get high as hell
The Narrator explains his calling: they write the new gospel, and they spread it to the kids. They're not offering salvation, but they might put you in a place where you could become your own savior ("we are our only saviors" [CSummer]); you might not be able to pull off Gideon's trick of getting "high as hell and born again" [BCamp, MoC], but at least you'll get high as hell.
Yeah, and sweet St. Paul, that must be the hardest luck saint of them all We met him at some suburban St. Paul mall But when St. Theresa came to Holly, I wasn't even at that party I'd already moved out to New York City
Here we get back to the crash and interrogation, and the work of spreading the gospel:
- Since his conversion under the hot soft light of the projector, Charlemagne is St. Paul, apostle to the Gentiles/ecumene (see "ecumenical" [HSL]; per "Gideon's Conversion" he was transformed from Charlemagne into Gideon, just as Saul was transformed into St. Paul after his conversion). He's the "hardest luck saint of them all" because he pulled off his escape only to have his separation from Mary become permanent [BCrosses], maybe also because he's transformed into Gideon in the same moment that the latter finally got his five kills and became "hard."
- Mary, St. Theresa, literally "came to," in the sense of "regained consciousness as" [SN, MoC, CC], Holly at that same party. For the sake of the rumor, the Narrator pretends not to have been there: he claims (similar to "I went there on business" [SiM]) to have already moved to New York City. But this is a lie, as showed both by "faked their way through 'Fairytale of New York'" further down, and by the testimony of the next verse; he was there, disguised as "the new kid" [OftC].
- The "suburban St. Paul mall" is identified by the liner notes as the HarMar Mall, where Holly crashed the car after the crucifixion. I don't know if their "meeting" Charlemagne there is presented here as part of the rumor, or part of the literal truth. It could be analogous to the apostles' meeting Jesus after the resurrection, especially if Holly's metaphoric "three straight days" [CatCT] is meant to identify the car ride with Jesus' tomb. Or maybe they just stumbled out of the car together before going their separate ways. I'd like to have a clearer account of this.
When Judas went up and kissed him I almost got sick I guess I knew what was coming I guess I knew it was coming
Continuing about Charlemagne and Holly/Mary, the Narrator confirms that St. Paul is Charlemagne. When Mary, disguised as Holly, went up to kiss Charlemagne's Ghost at the reservoir screening, it was meant to be a staged betrayal, but instead ended up as her confession of the love [HaRRF, SN, CC, etc.] she's harbored for him for sixteen years [SN]. Hearing it, the Narrator almost got sick: he's loved Mary for almost that long, and now the very thing she foresaw on their prom night long ago, when she broke his heart [MN, YGD, OWL], is finally happening. Of course he knew it was coming, since he's in on the play; but in some sense he's known it was coming for a long time.
We gather our gospels from gossip and bar talk then we declare them the truth We salvage our sermons from message boards and scene reports and we sic them on the youth We try out new testaments on the guys sitting next to us in the bars with the bars on the windows, alright Even if you don't get converted tonight, you gotta admit the band's pretty tight
Again, he describes the calling to write the new gospel, and spread it to the world. And even if you don't get converted, you have to admit (he lost Mary, but he came out of the story all right) that the band's pretty tight (again, "the band" is a regular way of referring to the Narrator [YGD, CSTLN, HSL, OWL]; in fact "They did" in the next verse opens up a direct account of his activity).
They did "She's Got Legs" into "Ain't Too Proud To Beg" Into something by the Dixie Dregs And they faked their way through "Fairytale of New York" When the band finished playing we howled out for more
In his own interrogation [SiM], the Narrator established an alibi for Holly-in-Mary by telling the cops that she was a good-looking girl ("in barlight she looked all right" :: "did 'She's Got Legs'") who was a bit desperate ("in daylight she looked desperate" :: "into 'Ain't Too Proud To Beg'") with a Dixie connection ("everything's fried here in Memphis," see also "she always said she was from Tennessee" [SPotC] :: "something by the Dixie Dregs"), and gave himself out as being in town from New York ("I went there on business" :: "they faked their way through 'Fairytale of New York'").
Then, with a nod to the Pogues' song, he makes a return to the present: When he stops telling stories, the audience howls out for more.
Hey Nelson Algren, Chicago seemed tired last night They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes Hey William Butler Yeats, all the Irish seemed wired last night They tried to separate our girls from our guys
They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes
He finishes with a shout out to Gideon, the inspiring Spirit (Algren/Yeats), letting him know that, after they "parade every townie in town through the station / but no one says nothing / and they can't find the weapon" [OftC], the cops (the Irish cops of Algren's Chicago, in their war with the [English] "black and tans" Skins [C&N, BCamp, "militia men" Knuckles], see also Irish Yeats vs. English Blake) seemed pretty tired last night. They were sitting in the darkness behind the interrogation lamp, smoking ("cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes") and drinking coffee ("wired") to stay awake; they sequestered the Narrator and Holly-in-Mary to try to crack them individually; but no one cracked.
(The cops "tried to separate our girls from our guys"; that is exactly what is meant by "sequestered" in Memphis. As for why "tried," we'll dive into that tomorrow.)
In Navy Sheets too we are informed that the interrogating cops are tired ("I guess we met a couple bona fide angels / but they all seemed kinda fat and fatigued" [NS]). They're described as angels after John 20:12, because they report that the car was empty after the crash; Charlemagne has left the tomb.
The description of the cops with "cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes" recalls the Skins, with alternatively the red vampire eyes ("the color of their eyes matches the color of our blood" [HM]) and the "lights" of crystal addiction in their eyes ("lights in their eyes" [Ambassador], cf. "the silver splinter in your eyes" [R&T]); the Skins also tried to "separate their girls from their guys." This is part of a deliberate ambiguity, running through "He asked, what happened to Charlemagne" [DLME] and "Someone must have said something" [RH], tuned by Craig to suggest that the Skins are the interrogators looking for Charlemagne; but in fact it's the cops. A "creeps/cops" symmetry is suggested in numerous places elsewhere as well [CatCT, BCamp (liner notes), Knuckles].
That took longer than expected, but CSTLN is a song that it's good to have broken down. There are still a few things to cover about Holly-in-Mary and the Narrator under interrogation; more on that tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 11, 2016 0:40:59 GMT -5
Time to start unpacking the run-in with the law. I'm going to be explicit about things I don't understand; maybe the solutions will jump out at me that way, or at someone else if not at me.
We said that Holly-in-Mary stumbles out of the car and into the mall, where she winds up in the florist. The Narrator-as-new-kid goes after her ("saw her walking through the crystal court" [PP]). Charlemagne-in-Gideon runs away from the scene.
The cops show up and arrest both Holly ("they found me in a florist" [SK]) and the Narrator and take them back to the station for questioning.
So far so good. This is where Sequestered in Memphis comes in.
The POV character of Sequestered in Memphis is the Narrator; under interrogation, he assumes the identity of someone in the Twin Cities (or who was in St. Paul) on business, who picked up Holly in a club.
It started when we were dancing It got heavy when we got to the bathroom
Like other elaborate lies in the story, this one is spun out of the truth; the Narrator and Mary's story really did start when they were dancing [YGD, MN, OWL], and got heavy after they got to the bathroom ("the dance floor was crowded / the bathrooms were worse" [MN]).
We didn't go back to her place We went to some place where she cat-sits
He denies going back to Holly/Mary's place. ("We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever" [SS]?) The "cat-sits" line is some brilliant lying, but if there's more to it than that I can't put my finger on it. The only cats I can think of are the panthers on Gideon's wall; no connection there that I can see.
She said, "I know I look tired But every thing's fried here in Memphis"
Memphis is "Graceland," home of Mary, full of grace [BCrosses]; "I was fried and out of focus" [SK].
Now they want to know exactly which bathroom Dude, does it make any difference? It can't be important Yeah, sure I'll tell my story again
The cops want him to repeat his story to see if he screws up; he's not going to do that, but what's more interesting is that they need him to screw up --- they don't seem to have anything on him. More evidence of this below.
In bar light she looked alright In daylight she looked desperate That's alright, I was desperate too I'm getting pretty sick of this interview
The "bar light / daylight" difference recalls the first night / last night contrast in First Night: on that first night, Holly was "golden with bar light and beer"; but when last night (the night of the crucifixion) came to an end and morning found them in the mall, she looked desperate.
By telling the cops that they spent the night together, the Narrator is establishing an alibi for her.
"That's alright, I was desperate too" is another outstanding line, plus it's true.
Again, "I'm getting pretty sick of this interview" shows that the Narrator holds the cards; he knows that they don't have any grounds to hold him.
Subpoenaed in Texas Sequestered in Memphis
The "sequestered" part is easy; it's a careful technical reference to the fact that the Narrator and Mary have been stuck in separate rooms for interrogation, to see if they contradict each other. We'll get to why this happens "in Memphis" tomorrow.
The "subpoenaed" part is more difficult. Following the "cowboy land" Texas metaphor, "in Texas" suggests that they were handed a subpoena requiring them to appear for testimony in connection with something that happened down in the "Texas" area of Payne Avenue and the Party Pit --- namely, the death of Gideon-in-Charlemagne. This part clearly seems to be right. But *why* are they subpoenaed?
I think she drove a new Mustang I guess it might be a rental I remember she had satellite radio I guess she seemed a bit nervous, do you think I'm that stupid?
Here the cops are asking what car Holly drove. This can only mean that they don't know she was at the wheel of the wreck in the entrance of the mall (it is Mary's car, after all, and though Holly is in Mary's body she is still disguised as Holly). The Narrator lies and says it's a Mustang ("I never rode a horse" [SS]?) and a rental (there is no car registered to Holly). "Satellite radio" is a quip about Mary's visions.
Then the cops ask something to which he responds "I guess she seemed a bit nervous, do you think I'm that stupid?" It's not quite clear to me what the exchange is here: it has to be something to the effect that (a) they ask whether she was behaving in an unusual way, (b) he makes the harmless admission that she seemed a bit nervous, but cuts it off there. (But maybe I'm the stupid one, and am missing something more?)
The rest is repetition of what went before, with the exception of
I went there on business
which again is a stonewalling generality; the Narrator knows they have nothing on him, and that they have to let him go.
So the big questions here are the following:
1. Is there another way to read this than that the cops don't know that the wrecked car is theirs?
2. If the cops don't know that they're responsible for the wreck, why did they get hauled in for questioning?
3. Even more: at least "couple photographs" [CatCT] and maybe also "stupid photo shoot" [SK] point to booking and mug shots for Holly, at least. Why does she get booked?
4. Even more more: "it was those two same kooks from that one stupid photo shoot" [SK] connects Charlemagne-in-Gideon to the mug shots, but we have reason to believe he's not there (more evidence coming tomorrow), to say nothing of the fact that his presence there would contradict the Narrator's story. If she's identifying him from existing photos, what's the reason for that? How could Charlemagne (who to the cops looks like Gideon) have come up in her interrogation without her exposing the Narrator's story as bullshit, which apparently she has not done?
5. Still more: why do they get subpoenaed, that is, summoned to appear to testify about Charlemagne's apparent murder, especially when the Narrator has established an alibi for her, that she wasn't there?
6. Is there something more to the full exchange behind "I guess she seemed a bit nervous, do you think I'm that stupid?"
Writing this out was helpful after all; I have some tentative answers that maybe aren't totally implausible:
1. No. They had wandered away from the car, and the cops don't know the wreck is theirs, in point of fact. It's a bit hard to imagine, but the reported exchange really doesn't seem to allow another reading.
2. They got hauled in for questioning because the cops have found the body in the Party Pit, and intend to "parade every townie in town through the station" [OftC], on minor pretext if they have to.
3. She gets arrested and booked for being drunk and disorderly (there's a lot of alcohol in the car time [MoC, SBS, SK, HSL, PP, A&H, R&T]).
4. Perhaps it is the *cops* who, as part of parading every townie in town through the station, put pictures (file photos?) of Charlemagne and Gideon in front of her? She says nothing to contradict the Narrator's account, but they still appear? Something like this ...
5. Perhaps the subpoena is accounted for by the fact that she shows some recognition of photos of Charlemagne and Gideon, despite the fact that she's apparently cleared of being present for the crucifixion? She does know them, and the eventual line of questioning in DLME shows that the cops do know that Holly is linked to both Gideon and Charlemagne ...
6. No, there's nothing more to it. (?)
Falling asleep again; I'll do more about these interrogations tomorrow. Thanks for following along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 9, 2016 20:35:27 GMT -5
Time to go through Arms and Hearts in a little more detail. The POV character is Charlemagne; the "you" he's addressing is Mary. To me it just felt like six or seven seconds, But I guess we went coast to coast The "six or seven seconds" is the time they spent under the white light of the projector at the end of the crucifixion. In this time Charlemagne's body is been switched for Gideon's, and Mary's soul is switched for Holly's. They went "coast to coast" in the sense that they went from "Massachusetts" (the crucifixion mass among the hostile Skins) to "Sacramento" (the sacraments of Eucharist, with the bodies and the blood [BCrosses, 212M, SA, etc.], and Baptism). To me he didn't seem all that holy, But I guess he might have been that ghost Again, this is about Gideon. Following the reading that he assumed Charlemagne's body, stabbed himself, and threw himself down from the water tower, he's taken the place of the ghost in a way that makes the original Holy Ghost identification simple and literal (another point in its favor). I'm not saying that he came off all that hot He burned a hole in me eventually I've been mostly living in the center of your most Holy Trinity Gideon is the guy with the "hot soft eyes" [FN], and the body-switch reading means that he did actually stab Charlemagne in the flesh. Why "burned" is used here is hard to say. Ambassador seems to suggest that the projector is "hot and hissing" [Ambassador], so maybe it's a reference to the deadly effects of its "hot soft light" [HSL]. With "I've been mostly living in the center of your most Holy Trinity," Charlemagne protests to Mary that he's himself, even though he's living in Gideon's body now. So maybe now you might go out with me, 'cause I got so much positivity And I've got so much positivity Now that the crucifixion is behind them, maybe Mary will "go out with him"? (Staying positive is a Charlemagne thing [Weekenders, HJ, ABlues, A&H].) There were amber waves of grain, And hawks and russet [?] thrushes There were serotonin rushes. There were purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain There were diamonds in the drain. This passage refers to the car time: - "serotonin rushes": related to the peyote "buttons" / "vision quest" [MoC] - "hawks": "like a hawk out on the highways / we were looking around for something that just died" [MoC]. This identifies "russet thrushes" with the prey of the hawk & the thing that just died, which in turn points to Mary as the "sweet missing songbird" [LID]. The russet Hermit Thrush is a noted songbird in the North American plains. But it's hard to tell if the word is actually "russet" or something else (I can't make any sense out of "rustle"). Ideas are welcome. - "amber waves of grain" are again referenced in DLME, when Charlemagne acknowledges what Holly was looking for during the drive: "Don't let me blow up / We'll hook it all up / I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain"; the liner notes have "I hear there's fields of speed in the amber waves of grain" [DLME]. - "There were purple mountain majesties above the fruited plain": the "getting high" mountains were above them, beckoning; but they didn't go there. ("fruit" might be a reference to themselves, see "barfruit" [BBlues] and "fruits in white suits" [PJ], which together seem to point to Mary in her "tight white rayon slacks" [Swish] at the first night bar party.) - "There were diamonds in the drain": it's not just that Charlemagne doesn't have any speed for Holly; he disposed of it and deliberately won't let her have any. (I'd forgotten about this; it's consistent with his warning her away from speed in HF, CatCT, etc., and with his penitent plea in the DLME line referenced above.) To me it didn't seem all that much better When he went and climbed up on that cross This appears to be a strong confirmer of the theory that Gideon committed suicide at the end of the crucifixion scene. To me you didn't seem all that much like a princess with your Bandaged hands and your hacking cough. Charlemagne is skeptical of Mary's status as a princess here; under the circumstances he might also be saying that she's changed (along the lines of "he didn't seem that different, except for his haircut" [OftC], or "she don't look like that same girl we met" [FN]). Arms and hearts and alcohol and faith We pull each other in and then we push it all away The emphasis on "alcohol" is a regular theme of the car time: "wandering the Sonoma" [MoC], "we drink and we dry up" [SBS], "I wanna open some bottles up" [SK], "instead we just started drinking" [HSL], "Gonna walk around and drink some more" [PP], and "alcohol" [A&H], all related to the Wedding at Cana and the attempt to recover Mary: "the banquet seething with emotions and wine" [R&T]. "Arms and hearts ... We pull each other in and then we push it all away": that's what's happened; Mary and Charlemagne finally got together, and then pushed it all away; Holly drove the car into the mall, and Charlemagne "cut her loose" [TOT]. There were crosses and crushes, crashes and hassles We were kissing in the center while the band played "Ice Cream Castles" There was the water tower cross, the characters' reciprocal crushes, the crash of the car into the mall, and the hassles with the cops coming up. "Kissing in the center" refers to Mary-as-Holly kissing Charlemagne's Ghost, while the Narrator ("the band"), the "new kid" begging them not to do it, played "Ice Cream Castles" (warning that it wouldn't last, like the "ice cream castles in the summertime" of the song). Arms and hearts and alcohol and death She was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet. It was "faith" before, but here it's "death": awkward and thoughtful like Holly [HH, BCamp], Mary died and ascended to heaven, dripping wet, both with sexual ecstasy and bleeding from her hands (compare "dripping wet with the special sauce" [BBlues]). Spent some time today thinking about the subpoena part of the police business and am still feeling like I have as many questions as answers. There's that quote from Craig about the legal terms surrounding the interrogations (in the 2008 NPR interview, link): The implication here is that the story around the legal proceedings is going to be pretty solidly constructed, which is good, because then you get strong confirmation of a coherent reading. I just don't quite have the coherent reading yet. We'll see. Thanks for sticking this part out, and thanks for keeping Still Alive Carl in your thoughts.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 9, 2016 1:40:17 GMT -5
There's not a whole of story left, just the various entanglements with the law now, and then the aftermath. I spent some time today trying to boil down what I still don't know. I'm missing two things which seem like big unknowns to me:
- Gideon's final trick really does look like it involved a double switch: swapping Holly's soul for Mary's, and swapping his own body for Charlemagne's. There are definitely some questions left ("he burned a hole in me eventually" [A&H] for example ... why "burned"?), but the big one is Jesse's "two kids died / one of them was crucified" [JaJ]. I can speculate, but I don't have a definite identification for the second, non-crucified kid yet.
- The run-in with the law really has a lot of moving parts, and I'm missing a slam-dunk chain of cause-and-effect to animate the whole thing. Maybe I just lay out what I've got and it holds up, but I feel like there's at least one more illuminating factor (something to just cut through the fog, like buddymo's "there has to be a body") that I'm still missing.
But in the meantime we've built up quite a list of songs that we want to wrap up, and it might be that going through those is going to help me see something I've missed. So let me do that, starting with Same Kooks. Apologies in advance for the thinking-out-loud quality of what follows.
Same Kooks -------------------
(POV character = Holly)
They found me in a florist, I was fried and out of focus I was kicking it with chemists The scratches on my back, they formed into a choir And belted out a chorus
The cops arrived on the scene at the HarMar mall, where Holly-in-Mary has crashed Mary's car into the entrance. They found her (1) in a "florist," (2) "fried," and (3) "out of focus" after (4) "kicking it" with chemists. This is tied closely to several other descriptions of the same crash:
- In "she said she was cruising but she came back all proud and out of focus with a cool car cranking Krokus" [GLS] we get (3) "out of focus" repeated literally, (1) "florist" echoed in "crocus" (the flower of springtime resurrection), and (4) "cruising" or hooking in the car.
- In "Running out on residue and crashing through the vestibule / The crucifixion cruise" [CC] we get (2) "fried" = "running out on residue," (4) "cruise" with a crash; she's also "reflecting on the resurrection," which ties, even if tenuously, to (1) "crocus" etc.
- In "She said I was seeing double for three straight days after I got born again" [CatCT] we get (3) "out of focus" = "seeing double" and (1) "born again"; this is followed by a hospital scene and a "couple photographs" that is mirrored in the "one stupid photo shoot" at the end of SK.
She continues: "I was kicking it with chemists"; this is the mirror of Charlemagne-in-Gideon's "I was kicking it with cousins" [HSL] (on "the first night she spent with that one guy she liked" [OftC]). Because both she and he are doubles ("seeing double"), the "I" is ambiguous and the object is plural (cf "Tramps like us and we like tramps" [CiS]). Both Charlemagne and Gideon have been chemists in the sense of dealers (Gideon with the Skins [Knuckles, SPayne, SN], Charlemagne hawking "Chemistry, currency" [OwtB], and compare also "It's a funny bit of chemistry how a cool car makes a guy seem that much cooler" [MoC]).
Both "I was kicking it" statements are made to the police, as part of the investigations following the crucifixion and car crash.
Holly goes on: "The scratches on my back, they formed into a choir And belted out a chorus" (cf. "Belt it out like back scratch choirs" [NS], also from the Sunday morning aftermath of the car crash). By analogy to the other little hoodrat friend [YLHF], Mary's tramp stamp appears to be belting out a chorus on the order of "damn right you'll rise again"; this is consistent with the context all the way through the first four verses here.
There were clicks and hisses and complicated kisses Gideon's got a pipe made from a Pringles can Hey hey, Providence You gotta fall in love with whoever you can
She remembers the Judas kiss of the crucifixion screening: "there were clicks and hisses and complicated kisses" (see "These Twin City kisses / They sound like clicks and hisses" [SBS], "When they kiss they spit white noise" [FN]). Charlemagne's Ghost said "I still love you Judas" [BCrosses]; Mary replied "I love you too" [HaRRF]; Holly came to and heard Gideon, with the Pringles can lens tube of his projector, call "Hey hey, Providence, you gotta fall in love with whoever you can" ("Providence," literally "foreseeing," because of her visions; the audience can't see the projector, but from their position on stage, the actors can).
I still don't quite get the drift of "you gotta fall in love with whoever you can" ... Gideon's saying it to Mary right before he kills her, basically, and himself. Feel like I've got a blind spot for this one.
The sheets stain but the sins wash away Naked bodies in the Narragansett Bay
Holly's still bleeding from Mary's stigmata, and "Everybody's coming onto navy sheets" [NS]; either/both of these stains are compared to "sins," and Charlemagne's "bleaching out the bloodstains" [GLS] makes him a "savior" for washing them away; but Gideon's washing away of Holly's body in the Mississippi harbor (Narragansett Bay) makes him a "savior" too.
Same kooks don't shoot but they sure do sniff Same kooks can't fly because their wings are clipped Same kooks can't come but they sure do kiss Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists
We talked about these lines. It seems Charlemagne-in-Gideon has some "sweet stuff" but no speed ("don't shoot"). Charlemagne couldn't "fly" the Twin Cities because he was stuck here by his attachment to Jesse; Gideon couldn't fly when he leapt from the water tower in Charlemagne's body, and he died ("There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly / But he didn't, so he died" [SBS]). Charlemagne-in-Gideon was kissing Holly-in-Mary (with the wrapped up wrists) but couldn't consummate their relationship sexually.
The Lord takes away and the Lord delivers Washed it all off in the Mississippi River
Holly was taken away, and again delivered, after her baptism; her sinful body was washed away.
We slept it off in the matinees We rip it up like the razor blades
Now we just need something to celebrate I wanna open some bottles up (I wanna open my body up) I'm getting tired Of all these styrofoam coffee cups
These lines echo a lot of the activity of MoC. See "we spent a few years nodding off in matinees, high as hell and shivering and smashed" [MoC], and suggestions of eating sugar packets for food in "we scrounge around for sustenance; we mostly eat it in the back half of the theaters" [MoC], "two cups of coffee and ten packs of sugar" [CatCT], "ripping into sugar packets" [OWL]; "ripping high" [CiS]. But with the "razor blades" simile, things are starting to get dark; Holly's starting to have undercurrents of suicidal thought ("I wanna open my body up"). Maybe this is simply meant to lead to her crashing the car; but the fact that she wants something to celebrate, something with alcohol, sounds like a more complex allusion to the Wedding at Cana and the choice for Self-Destruction that Mary made in that context [R&T].
If "the back half of the theaters" is the backseat of the car, we'd know where all of this happened, and maybe it's even a little like the situation in Banging Camp, where the Narrator in the front says "listen to the back of the theater" speaking of Charlemagne and Mary. But it feels like there ought to be a more compelling reason to use the matinee/theater metaphor here, if that's what's going on.
She said, "It's hard to feel holy when you can't get clean." Now she's bumping up against the washing machines She said, "It's hard to slow down when you're picking up speed."
With a switch into third person (to support the "bumping" description), Holly continues: "It's hard to feel holy when you can't get clean"; she's supposed to be resurrected, but she's still desperately addicted (not "clean," cf. YS for same sense; there may also be a secondary allusion to the bloodstains, like in "keep your bandages clean" [SS] earlier). The getting-off joke in "now she's bumping up against the washing machines" has a double entendre in the reference to Charlemagne/Gideon, washing away her sins (see above), as "washing machines." Finally, her suicidal thoughts and her desperate need to get some strong stuff (speed) issue in an allusion to the car crash to come: "It's hard to slow down when you're picking up speed."
It was those two same kooks from that one stupid photo shoot It was those two same kooks from that one stupid photo shoot
Calling back to the "out of focus" double vision and the cops mentioned in the first line, she describes Charlemagne-as-Gideon being booked: "It was those two same kooks from that one stupid photo shoot."
OK, and here something occurs to me that hadn't earlier.
I had been reading "that one stupid photo shoot" as suggesting that all three of them --- Holly, Charlemagne, the Narrator --- were picked up by the cops and booked ("photo shoot" = "couple photographs" [CatCT] = mug shots) at the same time. This didn't square with two things:
1. In Hot Soft Light, Charlemagne-in-Gideon is interrogated by the cops, and he leads by saying: "I was not involved up at the Northtown mall" [HSL]. He "accidentally" names the place where he supposedly didn't know that "it" happened, but it still works as a denial because he names the wrong mall. Yet that would be impossible if they'd picked him up at the scene of the crash.
2. For a variety of reasons, including the rest of the exchanges between Holly-in-Mary and Charlemagne-in-Gideon, I've thought that this Sunday morning [NS] was "Separation Sunday" --- that is, the Sunday on which Charlemagne leaves Mary/Holly for good ("Once you cut her loose ..." [TOT]).
So let's say that #1 and #2 are correct. Then what happens after the crash is the following: Holly stumbles out of the car and into the mall, where she winds up in the florist. The Narrator, still following her ("saw her walking through the crystal court"), goes after her. But Charlemagne, traumatized by his experience in the car, runs away from the scene. Only later do the cops pick him up, find something in his socks [YLHF] and hold him for questioning.
Holly's line "It was those two same kooks from that one stupid photo shoot" could be consistent with this account if it describes her ID'ing Charlemagne to the cops from a book of mugshots (she is still booked in her own right). I guess the question then is, what is she fingering him for?
That's enough for today. Thanks for sticking this out, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 8, 2016 0:10:34 GMT -5
So suppose you're Holly. You're coming down and desperate. Your savior (Charlemagne [Swish] / Gideon [HaRRF]) won't take what you're offering or give you what you need. Now you're back behind the wheel. Where are you going to go?
You're going where you know they sell the good stuff: you're going to the mall. (See Stevie Nix, where Holly describes her travels with Gideon: "They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls.")
Holly drove them to the HarMar mall north of St. Paul, and, running out on residue, crashed the car into the entrance. That's where their ride came to an end.
The evidence that it's the HarMar mall is in a couple of places. In Party Pit, the Narrator tells us that Mary
Sped through the scene until the engine stalled At some suburban shopping mall
where "sped through the scene until the engine stalled" is both a general description of her 1989-2004 trajectory, and a particular description of the car ride and eventual crash.
Then, in CSTLN, the Narrator tells us:
Yeah, and sweet St. Paul, that must be the hardest luck saint of them all We met him at some suburban St. Paul mall
We already went through Charlemagne's identification, after the crucifixion, with St. Paul the Apostle. He's the "hardest luck saint of them all" because, after fucking it up with Holly, and years of being thwarted with Mary, he finally gets his chance to be with her ... and suddenly she's Holly, and now that doesn't work. The events described in the rest of the song make it clear that the "meeting" described is at the time of the crash. Finally, the alternative lyric scribbled next to "suburban St. Paul mall" in the Separation Sunday liner notes identifies it as the "HarMar" mall, a point that will be backed up by other circumstances. (We'll get to line-by-line account of CSTLN soon.)
That she crashed the car into the mall entrance is also attested in a few places; Crucifixion Cruise:
Running out on residue and crashing through the vestibule The crucifixion cruise ...
This "vestibule" (unlike the one in RH) is the entrance to the mall; this "entrance" is also probably alluded to in "speed shooters driving round and coming down and trying to hook up with an entrance ramp" [CiS]. (Note by the way that it's called the "crucifixion cruise" because, freshly resurrected, she tries to hook Charlemagne-in-Gideon for a drug payoff during the trip.) In the Party Pit, the Narrator describes Mary after the crash:
Saw her walking through the crystal court She made a scene by the revolving doors She's gonna walk around and drink some more
where "crystal court" isn't the public space in the IDS center, but rather a metaphoric name for the mall as a place to buy crystal (like "the Citadel" for the water tower), and the "scene" she made is the car crash.
And as we already noted, she definitely puts the car through the glass doors of the entrance [HaRRF]:
She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass
Holly then gets out of the car with intent to "walk around and drink some more," as indicated in Navy Sheets:
Sunday morning, sidewalks splattered Feverish in stylish tatters
She's still dressed in the remains of Mary's skimpy outfit, and still dripping blood (though I think from the stigmata rather than injuries; it's a long shot but it could be that the "Sonoma" [MoC] / "drink some more" [PP] wine-drinking, leading to dehydration according to "we drink and we dry up" [SBS], combined with being born again and her bloody hands on the stereo, lead to "Kids with kidney stones giving birth to bloody stereos" [BBlues]).
It's "Sunday morning" after the "sabbath bloody sabbath" [HSL] of the crucifixion; the "5:30 folk mass" [MoC] to which it's compared is also a Saturday event ("Hit the 5:30 mass early Saturday night" [OWL]).
Anyway, Same Kooks again locates her in the mall after she's wandered off from the car:
They found me in a florist, I was fried and out of focus
"They" is the cops. And that's a good place to stop.
Thanks for reading, and for your thoughts for Still Alive Carl. Not sure exactly where I'm going to pick it up tomorrow, but in any case more tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 7, 2016 0:07:17 GMT -5
tbob's got you covered for the authoritative list of tracks. For a release-date chronology, I tried to work out which album-timeframe each of the original B-sides belongs to here (scroll to the table halfway through the post). Not a very precise way of doing it, but I did look up release dates to try to get the buckets right. The table is missing Just Sayin' and Ballad of the Midnight Hauler, as well as all the covers. Hope that helps.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 6, 2016 23:53:53 GMT -5
I ended up covering most of what we know about the car ride yesterday, leaving out just two things: what goes wrong, and how the crash goes down.
What goes wrong in the first place is that Holly doesn't get what she wants.
She doesn't get the meth she wants, that she's been accustomed to get from Gideon. There are hints of wine and peyote buttons and Feminax in MoC, but no speed. That's simple.
But the sex-for-drugs transaction doesn't just fail on the drugs end, it fails on the sex end too. Charlemagne half admits this in Navy Sheets:
Now I'm not really sure we were lovers Or if it was just some kind of car crash Now we're trying to find a DNA match To match the heads to their hats
He remembers the car crash, but he's "not really sure we were lovers." (And we understand why he's talking about DNA when trying to keep track of which people match which appearances at this point.)
But if Charlemagne's not sure, Holly, the POV character of Same Kooks, tells us exactly how it went down:
Same kooks don't shoot but they sure do sniff Same kooks can't fly because their wings are clipped Same kooks can't come but they sure do kiss Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists
The "two same kooks" are Charlemagne/Gideon --- remember that the song starts off with her saying "I was ... out of focus" [SK] = "seeing double" [CatCT]. And "the girls with the wrapped up wrists" are Holly/Mary.
Charlemagne-in-Gideon "can't come but [he] sure do kiss" making love to Holly-in-Mary. We recall that Charlemagne's thing for kissing Jesse [HJ, Magazines, HH] was a reflection of his identifying her with Holly, that he and Holly had kissed a lot before she left, but had otherwise had a chaste relationship. He's a kisser for sure, she thinks; but now that she wants to fuck, he can't seal the deal.
The "don't shoot but they sure do sniff" line seems to refer to him having something snortable, but not the speed she really wants.
I had previously thought "can't fly because their wings are clipped" was just a reference to the SBS line we looked at in connection with RH, to the effect that Charlemagne couldn't run away from the Twin Cities; but now that we're looking at Gideon having jumped from the water tower to his death, and the possibility that he did so in Charlemagne's body, it's clear that there's more to this line. (Still thinking it through, but the Charlemagne/Gideon body-switch hypothesis seems to be gaining ground.)
For yet another view of Charlemagne-in-Gideon and Holly-in-Mary's failed attempt at sex, there's CatCT:
She said I was seeing double for three straight days after I got born again It felt strange but it was nice and peaceful and it really pleased me to be around so many people Of course, half of them were visions, half of them were friends from going through the program with me Later on we did some sexy things, took a couple photographs and carved them into wood reliefs
What's meant by Holly being "born again" and "seeing double" is clear. "So many people" are the "multitude" of MoC, the double figures of Charlemagne/Gideon and probably herself/Mary and the Narrator/new-kid too. "Half of them were visions" suggests that she's inherited some of Mary's visionary power, even if they're "lousy connections" [CC]; we'll see more of this later. "Friends from going through the program with me" suggests that they're all "coming down" [CiS] together; we recall that Charlemagne seeing "Christ in all his glory" --- also mentioned as being in the car here [CiS] --- was a "detox dream" [HM].
"Later on we did some sexy things" refers to the same failed attempt at sex in the car: the buttons come open [MoC], they kiss [SK], the legs are wide open [NS], but Charlemagne "can't come" [SK].
The "took a couple photographs" part is when they get arrested and booked, coming up soon.
"Three straight days" is another thing I don't know what to do with exactly; next to the "few hours," "few months," and "few years" of MoC, it seems like yet another unreal measure of time. In context we're inclined to think of the three days that Jesus spent in the tomb after the crucifixion, and maybe that's what the car time is supposed to represent (there are further indications of this in NS), but it's hard to build on metaphor when the facts on the ground are so tenuous.
What isn't tenuous, though, is the evidence for Charlemagne's experience. He goes from finally getting his chance to consummate things with Mary, to discovering that Mary is gone and her body inhabited by Holly, to learning that Holly is now suddenly more than ready to fuck him, to realizing that that readiness is nothing more than "wired for sound" [CatCT] "hard fast noises" [GLS] designed to get him off and get him to cough up the drugs. It's a devastating letdown; "such a sad time together" says a mouthful.
With that, we know what Charlemagne is referring to as the POV character of Citrus:
Lost in fog and love and faithless fear I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere
The "fog and love and faithless fear" is the world they wandered into on leaving the scene of the crucifixion [HM]. Holly's kisses are pure drug-addicted reflex; Mary's kiss, the Judas kiss of the crucifixion, was sincere.
I thought I'd get as far as the crash today, but I underestimate everything. I hope this is resonating, that all the crazy double-persons stuff is beginning to appear as a simple and clean way to account for a lot of apparent chaos. Thanks as always for remembering Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 6, 2016 2:45:41 GMT -5
The car ride is a mess. We are not told much about it, what we are told is scattered all over the place, and most of it is description under the influence of intoxicants. But we can put it together from the pieces. Let's start with the bare facts. The occupants of the car are the Narrator-as-new-kid, Holly-in-Mary, and Charlemagne-in-Gideon. (I'm going to go with "Charlemagne-in-Gideon" over "Charlemagne-as-Gideon" post-crucifixion, because I have to make a choice now, and I think the FN line about the "hot soft eyes" tips the scale in that direction. If this turns out to be wrong, I'll correct it for the second part of the timeline.) Holly is at the wheel both at the beginning [BCrosses, MoC] and at the end of the ride (we'll get to this tomorrow). At some point in the middle she's not driving because she's trying to get with Charlemagne-in-Gideon (evidence below); it appears that the Narrator takes the wheel at this time. This is kind of an uncomfortable situation, but no worse than ones in Party Pit and Rock Problems, for example; the Narrator has followed Mary down this far and he's going to stick it out with her no matter what she does --- even if she's died and her body, inhabited by Holly, is getting with his friend in the backseat. (And as it turns out, there's going to be a purpose for his presence; she will need him before everything is quite done.) How long does the ride last? This is obscured by the MoC telling, which describes it alternately as lasting "a few months," "a few hours," and "a few years," and adds that they drive "at nights." After a lot of wrestling with the thin evidence I believe it's just the one night, that they drive until morning (technically the line about "a few hours circling the city" is accurate, although this can't be confirmed from MoC itself). All the "months" and "years" are hallucinatory metaphor. How does the ride end? The "multitude of casualties" and all the hints about "crashes" give that away; but let's develop the details out of a closer look at the evidence. So, first, basic evidence for the fact that Holly-in-Mary is trying to get with Charlemagne-in-Gideon. This is alluded to in MoC (POV Charlemagne): And the night that she got born again He was getting with her little hoodrat friend and again in DLME (POV Charlemagne): I can feel the whole scene Starting to corrode When we're fooling around on the frontage roads and again in Navy Sheets (POV Charlemagne), where familiar elements of the crucifixion confirm that "opening night" is a reference to the staging of the crucifixion movie (see also SA), and we get "legs wide open on the opening night": Everybody's reaching for the sharpest knife Legs wide open on the opening night Everybody's bathing in the laser lights Clever kids screwing with some new device With that much squared away, let's go through the parts of Multitude of Casualties that we haven't done yet: She drove it like she stole it She stole it fast and with a multitude of casualties She said I shipped it out from Boulder Packed in coffee grounds and wrapped around in dryer sheets The stealing, driving, and casualties we've talked about. My guess is that the "it" that got "shipped out" is the cross necklace mentioned in Banging Camp, which is found to be missing just a few lines later, thereby setting up the end of the song in which "youth services" find a way to get the cross back into her life anyway. (The mysterious appearance of a necklace later in ToT appears to suggest that Mary actually shipped it to herself before she went down to the Party Pit to die.) But I'm still missing a really crisp motivation for this, so let me leave it at that for now. We spent a few months just wandering the Sonoma High as hell and shivering and smashed We were trying for a vision quest We opened up three buttons But all we saw was desert trash The song is sung from Charlemagne's POV. When he says "we were trying for a vision quest," he means that he was in the car with Holly-in-Mary, trying to find the real Mary, with her visions, underneath; he opened up three buttons on her shirt, but the cross she was wearing around her neck [BCamp] was gone. The whole passage is piled with double meanings. The "three buttons" suggest peyote buttons (see, possibly, the "serotonin rushes" of A&H, also from the car time), which fit with the literal meaning of "vision quest"; but they also recall the three open buttons among which Holly (not Mary pretending to be Holly in Banging Camp, but the real Holly) wore her own cross necklace [CatCT]. The act of opening up the buttons is also part of Charlemagne and Holly "fooling around on the frontage roads." The reference to "desert trash" makes it pretty clear that "the Sonoma" is supposed to suggest "the Sonora" desert; the Hold Steady Wiki ( link) says: The answer to this difficulty is that Craig is deliberately punning on Sonoma/Sonora, "Sonoma" being a place-name metaphor for wine. Charlemagne appears to be plying Holly-in-Mary with wine, because that's what Mary always drinks [MM, YGD, MN, LID, SPotC, Spinners, R&T]; this is their Wedding at Cana moment, as foretold by her in R&T, only Mary herself is no longer here, and Charlemagne's frantic search for her comes to nothing. It's a funny bit of chemistry How a cool car makes a guy seem that much cooler For years prior to leaving her party with Gideon, Holly had been keeping Charlemagne at a chaste distance; now, without preamble ("straight to sex without ... real talk about souls") she wants to fuck him ("legs wide open on the opening night"). Charlemagne, with some irony, puts it down to the influence of the "cool car" making him look cooler. But in fact it's due to the influence of "chemistry," that is, her chemical dependence; Holly, "seeing double" after she got born again [CatCT], sees him as Gideon, in whose body he is after all appearing to her. She's having a Pavlovian reaction; she wants her fucking drugs, and wants them with increasing urgency ("speed shooters coming down and driving round and trying to hook up with an entrance ramp" [CiS]). And it's worth noting throughout history Kids come around the corner to a multitude of casualties There's going to be a crash, and one with a whole multitude of casualties, namely the Narrator and Charlemagne and Gideon and Holly and Mary, all five. We spent a few hours circling the city Like a hawk out on the highways We were looking around for something that just died It's Mary who they're looking for, who just died. (See "hawks" in the A&H car time passage also.) And they really are circling around the city; as the end of the song mentions, they start out in Lowertown, and then roll out onto the parkways, as foreshadowed in OftC. It appears to be in "circling the city" that the driving the "wrong way down 169" moment [HH] comes in; the two versions of "speed shooters coming down and driving round and trying to hook up with an entrance ramp" [CiS], with "exit ramp" in the liner notes and "entrance ramp" in the recorded version, seem to allude to this. At any rate, 169 is flanked with frontage roads "up by Edina High" [HH], and if they got on the highway going in the wrong direction, they might in fact escape to the relative safety of the frontage roads by exiting via an entrance ramp. We heard the deacon's hopeful eulogy At least in dying you don't have to deal with New wave for a second time The musical reference reveals that the "deacon" is the Narrator, remembering his and Mary's high school life living through New Wave the first time around. This is confirmed by HaRRF, which, describing Holly's return in the "Easter" mass in the Party Pit, says: The priest just kinda laughed, the deacon caught a draft She crashed into the Easter mass with her hair done up in broken glass The priest presiding over the mass, as we know already, is Gideon ("kinda laughed" seems right in general, and may even allude to his "Hey hey Providence" [SK]); the deacon is the Narrator down on stage, helping out with the service. The "draft" is again an allusion to Pentecost [Acts 2], when "the Holy Ghost" came with a sound like "a mighty wind" to fill the Apostles, led by Peter (the Narrator in the THS story), on the day that they began preaching to the world. (And I include the "hair done up in broken glass" bit because this too belongs to the imminent car crash; she doesn't go through the windshield, but it is pebbled window glass in her hair. The events of the crucifixion up through the car ride and the crash are here being conceived of as a single event, something else that gave me a lot of difficulty until I realized that they all take place in the course of a single night.) And after your party we got off the grid Oh we just couldn't get with all those clever kids This is a reference to Holly's party; addressing Holly, Charlemagne includes himself as Gideon in his "we." And now we forage on the frontage roads We drive at nights I guess it just feels somewhat safer Yeah, we scrounge around for sustenance We mostly eat it in the back half of the theaters We spent a few years nodding off in matinees We were high as hell and shivering and smashed Yeah, we were hoping for an action adventure Or something loud that we could feel through all the Feminax For a while I thought that there might be some reading per which they actually stop driving and take breaks in the theaters, but this is absurd. The possibility of ambiguous reference to the Hennepin years, or even the "first night" Swish party with the Feminax, makes it really hard to pin these lines down to a particular meaning. At any rate I am not sure what to pull out of them besides that our friends have well and truly hit bottom; they are wrecked and scrounging and desperate, and it's going to end soon. And after the movie We got off the ground Got in your car Crawled around in Lowertown As noted above; after getting up off the ground (to which they had fallen [R&T, ABlues, etc.]) at the end of the crucifixion and piling into Mary's car, they start out in Lowertown and roll out onto the parkways [OftC], from which they will begin "circling the city." He's switched from "you" meaning Holly to "you" meaning Mary, but after all he's talking to the same person; and this sets up the ambiguous meanings of "she" in the verses at the end. That's enough for now; it's only about half the car-time story but we'll pick up the rest tomorrow. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 4, 2016 23:59:20 GMT -5
Yeah, I've been making a list the last couple of days of things that I need to rethink, or at least double-check, and "I think I know how he did that" is an appropriate addition to the list. (I'd always thought the line referred to the Pepper's Ghost trick, and I guess that could still be. But now it really depends on the timing of the delivery, if it's not to be too lighthearted for the circumstances.) I've done lots and lots of backtracking along the way to this point, just not in public :-) so this isn't new. But we're getting into a couple of areas where I never had it figured out to begin with, and there'll be some work involved in clearing this all up. I think the best thing to do, both to keep people entertained and to give myself some room to think, is to keep going with other things that I do have more or less sorted out. My original understanding was that Charlemagne looked outwardly like Gideon, and for a lot of what follows it doesn't make much difference if it's just that, or he's actually in Gideon's body. So we can move on. Hostile, Mass tells us how the mass among the hostile Skins ends: I'll be damned if they didn't disappear Wandered out of Mass one day and faded into the fog and love and faithless fear. Charlemagne in sweatpants and you and me in Hostile, Massachussetts The three who were there together were Charlemagne (in sweatpants), Mary (disguised as Holly), and the Narrator (disguised as the new kid); and after it went white, they fled. The next thing that happens is the getaway described in Both Crosses: she's in the driver's seat, seeing "the guys coming in from the sides" [BCrosses], and then [MoC]: She drove it like she stole it She stole it fast and with a multitude of casualties She stole it because it's Mary's car, and she's Holly now; and she drove it fast. There are going to be a multitude of casualties at some point, but right now we're interested in what happens on the road. The first thing that happens is what muzzle was talking about. Finally, Charlemagne is thinking, they're free; now maybe they can finally get together. Arms and Hearts is all about this; Charlemagne suggests that now maybe Mary might go out with him ... To me he didn't seem all that holy, But I guess he might have been that ghost I'm not saying that he came off all that hot He burned a hole in me eventually I've been mostly living in the center of your most Holy Trinity So maybe now you might go out with me, 'cause I got so much positivity Charlemagne describes the crucifixion (clearly "six or seven seconds," "coast to coast," and "burned a hole in me eventually" are related to the open question of what exactly Gideon did with Charlemagne, but let me just make a note of this and move on). Then he pops the question ... There were crosses and crushes, crashes and hassles We were kissing in the center while the band played "Ice Cream Castles" Arms and hearts and alcohol and death She was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet. "Crosses and crushes" we know about; "crashes and hassles" sounds like it might have something to do with the car and casualties that we're anticipating. "Kissing in the center" is a description of Mary-as-Holly and Charlemagne's Ghost kissing at the fence beneath the projector, while the Narrator played "Ice Cream Castles" (a song about the fleeting moment of being together before it's over, like ice cream castles melting in the summertime --- a foreshadowing of what's to come). And then there are intimations of the death of Mary, ascending into heaven dripping wet with ecstasy, both sexually and from her bleeding stigmata. Charlemagne wants finally to get with Mary, but it's too late; she's gone. And in fact it's worse than that. Let's go back for a minute to Crucifixion Cruise, which is a good place to start. Halleluiah came to in the confession booth Infested with infection Smiling on an abcessed tooth We talked about this: in the center of the mass, beneath the projector, Mary confessed her love to Charlemagne's Ghost ("I heard her say 'I love you too'" [HaRRF]). In that moment, Holly came to; she finds herself in Mary's body, infested with infection, with her teeth going bad, but she's alive, and smiling. Running out on residue Crashing through the vestibule The crucifixion cruise Again there seems to be a switch from the crucifixion context to a car ride context, with a suggestion of a crash; maybe a crash with some casualties attached. She climbed the cross and found she liked the view I take this as meaning more or less the same as the earlier lines, that she took stock of being resurrected, and found she was pretty happy about it. We should note that being born again and being resurrected are here treated as interchangeable concepts; that's implicit in plenty of other places in the songs, but here it's really clear. She was baptized --> resurrected, just like Charlemagne was crucified --> born again (see what we said about "He was getting high as hell" [MoC]), when strictly speaking the opposite outcomes are expected. Another thing to note about this equivalence: it seems to suggest that Gideon's projector-on-the-water-tower cross has a precedent in the "crosses made of pipes and planks / Leaned up against the nitrous tanks" [BCamp]. The projector is made of a pipe (itself made from a Pringles can; more about this when we get to SK & FN), and apparently a plank, and is leaned up against a tank. This is a little tenuous, but definitely good enough to hold up for consideration. And sat reflecting on the resurrection And dreaming about an old connection The liner version of the second line reads Laughing off the ....conception which is clearly a reference to the Immaculate Conception ( wikipedia), the doctrine that the Virgin Mary was born with a soul free from original sin; compare "one drop of blood on immaculate Keds" [OftC]. It seems Craig wanted this as an expression of Holly's readiness to dispense with innocence, but couldn't make a satisfactory fit out of the line. Instead, we're told that Holly was dreaming about an old connection. Who this is, is revealed by what follows: Talking loud over lousy connections Here's a first suggestion that Mary, "so well connected / my UPC is dialed into the system" [Swish], is still in there somewhere; the connections are lousy (see "I was seeing double for three straight days after I got born again" [CatCT], with the liner note "2:3 vision"; "I was fried and out of focus" [SK], and "She said she was cruising but she came back all proud and out of focus with a cool car crankin' Krokus" [GLS], where the crocus is the flower of springtime resurrection), but she can still see her savior in sweatpants ... She put her mouth around a difficult question She said Lord, what do you recommend To a real sweet girl who's made some not-sweet friends? Lord, what do you prescribe To a real soft girl who's having real hard times? And she prays to her savior ... for a prescription. She tells him she's sweet and soft, and "put her mouth around" it. Holly came to, still addicted; it's Charlemagne who's in front of her, but the person she sees is Gideon (seeing double, out of focus). She's "dreaming" about Gideon, her old connection, because she wants her drugs, and in full-on conditioned response she offers him the usual of sex in exchange ("real sweet girl"; "real soft girl"; "put her mouth around"). You can probably see where this is going; in any case this is a good place to stop, and I need to sleep. Thanks for sticking with it, and for your thoughts for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 4, 2016 1:38:12 GMT -5
I had written a lot of the following out yesterday before buddymo's post got me thinking about the problem of a criminal trial, and had begun with the following two sentences:
As will appear below, there's a lot of ambiguity around the question of what exactly happens to Gideon. I had thought (I had hoped; I really like Gideon!) that he'd seized the moment to "ride away" after the battle, like One Tin Soldier, maybe to go see the New York City he'd always talked about. Admittedly, something in that scenario felt a bit off after his implication in the death of Holly. But he'd brought her back, so maybe that evened things out.
I realize now that that's not how it went down. Let me make a revised pass through my initial collection of evidence, and then I'll add on the things that have come clear since working through buddymo's question.
The first suggestion of suicide in connection with Gideon is in ASD, when he says:
All the small talk seems like suicide The spiderwebs with the legs and eggs and eyes They creep up from behind.
The "won't you wade into the water with me?" line reported in BCamp lets us see that it's Gideon whom Holly (Holly-in-Mary) is weeping for at the end of MoC:
They did "Wade Into The Water" into "One Tin Soldier" She started to cry
where "One Tin Soldier" is a reference to the folk song, specifically the end:
There won't be any trumpets blowing Come the Judgment Day On the bloody morning after One tin soldier rides away
What I first wrote was that "this suggests Gideon (the Biblical Gideon with 300 trumpets) 'rode away' after the bloody spectacle was over"; I thought Holly was crying for him because he he'd left. Now I'm reading that "Judgment Day" as something darker; I think she's crying for him because he's dead.
At the end of One for the Cutters, too, Holly-in-Mary mourns Gideon bitterly:
She's sick of the questions, sick of the concept Of justice and fairness, who the hell cares Who gets caught in the middle? She smokes and she ponders this riddle
When one townie falls in the forest, can anyone hear it? When one townie falls When one townie falls in the forest, does anyone notice?
Again, I originally thought this meant that no one had noticed his disappearance (this was what I was referring to a few days ago when I wrote "the whole point of the third thing is that nobody notices it"). But now I think I was wrong about that, and that she meant something very particular. More on this below.
Knuckles, of all things, gives us reason to believe that he's still alive somewhere:
And his elbow was a spiderweb With five spiders trapped inside and he said "You know, the last guy, I guess he didn't even have to die But the first four looked so nice, I wanted five." "The first four looked so nice..."
The first four, of course, are Holly (drowned), the Narrator (become the new kid), Charlemagne (become Gideon), Mary (become Holly) --- all of them dead either by Gideon's hand (Holly), or under his direction (Narrator), or through his magic (Charlemagne and Mary).
In other words, *Gideon really did get those kills.*
The last guy, Gideon himself, didn't even have to die (unlike Charlemagne who did); it's just that the first four looked so nice ...
I've been trying to get people to call me Sunny D. 'Cause I got the good stuff the kids go for But people keep calling me Five Alive
'Cause the last guy didn't really die, I just lied And the first four didn't really die, I just lied ...
And so I had been reading this as evidence that Gideon's "death" was really just a disappearance, a vanishing magic trick. But after considering buddymo's question, I think his "death" must have been something more like Holly's "death"; he put a part of himself into Charlemagne, in the same way that he put a part of her into Mary, and then killed himself.
All right, here's what I've been thinking about since yesterday. I still don't have it all figured but I'm well off the end of the ski jump now ... too late to hit pause, can only go forward.
First, what buddymo said was right. It's clearly a criminal trial. "She swears she was with him" describes an alibi for a crime committed in some particular place. There must have been evidence of a crime committed in that place. There has to be a body.
There's the line in BCrosses, "she saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk," which I had originally taken to be part of the performance; but on second thought it is certainly more likely that this refers to the cops finding and taking away a real body. (If the kids brought a body bag along, they would have to go back to the car to get it, and would have to feign struggling with the weight of the body, all of quickly gets absurd if it's supposed to be consistent with an impromptu knife-fight.)
So, whose body is it? We haven't yet gone through this in any kind of systematic way, but there's lots of evidence that the Narrator-as-new-kid, Charlemagne-as-Gideon, and Holly-in-Mary all survive the crucifixion. Gideon on the other hand is never seen again. If someone dies it has to be Gideon.
Then there's the evidence of Both Crosses:
She's known a couple of boys that died And two of them were crucified The last one had enlightened eyes The first guy he was Jesus Christ
I had been assuming that the "couple of boys" were Charlemagne-as-Gideon as viewed both before and after the moment of Gideon's Conversion. But if Gideon killed himself after Charlemagne stabbed Charlemagne's Ghost, then we have a literal reading: the first guy was Charlemagne's Ghost, the Christ of Mary's visions; the second guy was Gideon himself (with the special eyes [Swish, HSL, BCrosses, BBreathing]).
If Gideon was really crucified, that means that he was stabbed; if no one else stabbed him, then he stabbed himself. Which brings us back yet again to the R&T line
Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword
King Saul committed suicide by falling on his sword; this has got to be a Biblical parallel to Gideon's suicide. Which puts a completely new construction on
When one townie falls in the forest, does anyone notice?
I think this has to mean: everyone believes that the dead boy was the victim of the stabbing; but in the confusion, nobody noticed him fall from the top of the water tower. (The "forest" is the "woods" [OftC] of the Party Pit.)
It occurs to me that this reading would produce two more amazing Biblical parallels: one with the baptism of Jesus (Charlemagne born again as Gideon), at the end of which the Holy Ghost descends from Heaven; the other with the Fall of man immediately preceding Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden ("wandered out of mass"). But I don't want to get too caught up in the metaphor stuff until the story is locked down with a compelling internal logic.
The "one townie falls" reading can square with some things in the story, too. Nothing that happens in the immediate aftermath of the crucifixion suggests that the Narrator, Charlemagne, or Holly have any idea that Gideon is dead; that has to be something they learn later. If Gideon falls unnoticed at the foot of the tower, a little way behind the fence ("suicide ... they creep up from behind"?), that would account for their not noticing.
It could also explain the missing weapon; Gideon could have stabbed himself, left the knife on top of the water tower, and let himself fall.
Yet another "fall" that has to be significant in this connection is Gideon's last line:
Hey hey, Providence You gotta fall in love with whoever you can
I had already understood that "Providence" was a gang-style ("Hey Bloomington" etc.) handle for Mary, since it literally means "foreseeing." But I hadn't yet figured out what the "you gotta fall in love" line meant, and now I still don't know. I have to think about this. That's one open question.
Here's another question: what exactly was the nature of Gideon's conversion?
It was already clear (as I wrote a couple of days ago) that Charlemagne was transformed into Gideon in some lasting way that he hadn't been before. But now I'm thinking that the vague edges around that change are gone --- that Gideon's magic trick was in fact *literally* to swap his own body for Charlemagne's, in the same way that he swapped Holly's soul for Mary's.
The simple symmetry with Holly in Mary's body makes this a very attractive idea. And in fact it solves a problem I hadn't known what to do with, that in First Night Charlemagne is described as having Gideon's "hot soft eyes." A full body swap would be required to make that happen; a haircut and sweatpants won't cut it.
I want to say that if Gideon did swap his own body for Charlemagne's, then the swap ought to have been reciprocal --- meaning that the dead body found at the foot of the water tower really was Charlemagne's, though Charlemagne was still alive in Gideon's body. The discovery of Charlemagne's body clearly sells the story of Charlemagne's death; the discovery of Gideon's body would clearly undermine it. But I'm still not clear about what this would mean for certain aspects of the trial and the police interrogations, plus now I'm having to rethink the possible states of Jesse's knowledge vis-a-vis "Then one summer two kids died / One of them was crucified" [JaJ]. So let me keep this open for now also.
I'm really sorry for all the thinking out loud here. (This is what most of the worked-out parts of the story looked like for me at one point or another; I've got enough faith in Craig at this point to believe it'll fall into place if I stay after it.) Keep in mind too that the whole BAGIA album, per Craig, is explicitly about boys and girls in America having a sad time together because their bodies are trying to hook up while their souls are somewhere else. As soon as we're done with the crucifixion, we'll dive into SBS, HSL, SK, FN, the rest of PP, and Citrus, and this apparent insanity is going to seem simpler.
If you're still reading and haven't lost patience with the last couple of days, thanks. Still Alive Carl is still out there too; thanks for keeping him in mind through all this. More tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 2, 2016 23:28:16 GMT -5
Thanks, man, and please don't hesitate to nitpick --- I want to get this right, and the help is welcome. I'm looking ahead at what I still have to cover and there are some rocky spots in terms of what I'm sure of, so if you think you see something it's worth poking at. This is a good detour for today, too; I can go through the questions and pick up some useful things along the way. You basically raise two things and I have a reasonable answer for one of them. The second I don't yet. So there are a couple of things here. Early on in these posts I made the case, or tried to, that many of the songs jump around in time. Personally I found this counter-intuitive, but having made my peace with it I can see that it gives Craig a lot of flexibility when it comes to reassembling the same old events around whatever theme or idea he wants to dig into. It's not too hard to accept that this is happening in early songs like Hostile, Mass., where things feel pretty wild and disjoint to begin with, or in say Stevie Nix, where there are direct statements to make it obvious that that's what's going on. Where it gets harder are those songs where Craig deliberately puts things side by side to trick your brain into interpreting them as causally or chronologically connected, when they're not. Multitude of Casualties is a major (and very difficult) example of this; One for the Cutters is another. In my reading of OftC there are five jumps back and forth between Mary's time in college at U Minn from 1989-93, and the events around the crucifixion in 2004. stanzas 1-4
| "When there weren't any parties ... they knew nothing about it"
| starts college 1989-93
| stanza 5 | "The night with the fight ... that one guy she liked" | forward to crucifixion-era 2004 | stanza 5 | "She gave him a ride ... the cops finally found him" | back to Columbus Ave apt. 2004 | stanzas 6-11 | "He didn't seem that different ... do you know where your kids are?" | forward to crucifixion-era 2004 | stanza 12 | "Sniffing at crystal ... she was getting good grades" | back college 1989-93 | stanza 12 | "But when she came home for Christmas / She just seemed distant and different" | forward to Xmas 2004 |
That puts "getting good grades" back in the college era, to start. For "came home for Christmas" Craig knows that, following the college stuff, you're going to read it as "came home from school for Christmas break," even though he doesn't actually say anything of the kind. We've seen a lot of tricks like this by now, and I'm pretty sure you won't have a problem with my arguing that she went home for Christmas in 2004. What's left is "sophomore accomplice," which I also include in the events of 2004. For the solution to this, let me take a little detour through the end of Multitude of Casualties: While she was at The Citadel He was getting high as hell When she came to in the matinee She was asking 'round for someplace else to stay While he was down in Lowertown She was feeling out the 5:30 folk mass And the night that she got born again He was getting with her little hoodrat friend We have four couplets here, each about a pair of things that happen at the same time. On first hearing we tend to imagine that they tell a story progressing in time from pair 1, to pair 2, to pair 3, and finally pair 4. But in fact all four pairs are about the crucifixion. 1. The Citadel is the name of a homeless shelter in St. Paul, but Craig's using it to refer to the water tower, like a physical citadel (or agian like "the castle" in Saddle Shoes). While Mary was at the water tower, Charlemagne was getting high as hell, meaning that he was being born again as Gideon under the influence of Gideon's magic ("you'll be high as hell and born again" [BCamp, see also CSTLN]). 2. When Holly came to during the crucifixion movie ("matinee"), she was asking 'round for someplace else to stay because the last thing she remembers is that Gideon, with whom she'd been living before her baptism, was trying to kill her. 3. While Charlemagne was down in Lowertown for the crucifixon, she was at Gideon's mass for the Skins (which "kick[ed] off early" [LA]). We've already seen lots of cases in which Lowertown, Payne Avenue, the railroad yard, the banks of the river, and the Party Pit are understood as a single place; Craig chooses "Lowertown" here to create the false impression that Charlemagne's visiting Jesse in St. Paul, and that, as in YLHF, the "little hoodrat friend" is Jesse. But this is a red herring. 4. And the night that Mary got born again, Charlemagne was getting with her little hoodrat friend Holly. (As muzzle noted, referring to OftC: "The night of the crucifixion was 'the first night she spent with that one guy she liked.'") They did "Wade Into The Water" into "One Tin Soldier" She started to cry Yeah, youth services always find a way To get their bloody cross Into your druggy little messed up teenage life In Gideon's mass, they did "Wade Into The Water," referring to his baptism of Holly [BCamp], and "One Tin Soldier," which I'll talk about tomorrow; Holly started to cry. Like other "youth services," this one (Gideon's mass for the Skins) found a way to get its bloody cross into her druggy little messed up teenage life. Holly's still messed up and addicted to drugs, but the operative word here is *teenage*. As I argued back when talking about the "Industrial Age" party, Holly is still 19 years old. And that's the solution to the OftC "sophomore accomplice" problem: she's the age of a college sophomore. (It's possible that she wears a turtleneck sweater just because she's in court and has to cover her neck tat, but I think the drastic departure from Mary's skimpy little outfits is another signal that it's Holly in Mary's body. As is "she just seemed distant and different," of course.) Another thing to consider is that OftC, out of all the songs, is the one that most sounds like it comes from an objective 3rd person narrator (it seemed almost to be separate from the story when I first heard it). My take on this now is that this was the only way for Craig to tell the story with Mary as the POV character, following the one-POV-character-per-song rule already in place, and not have to include post-crucifixion first-person statements coming from Holly's consciousness. YMMV on whether this is a reasonable take, but I think if you're satisfied with the account of the overall story, it won't be hard to accept. Going back to the MoC verses, muzzle asked this a while back: MoC is one song where you clearly have to go through and do exactly that --- to say, here, "she" is Mary; here, "she" is Holly, etc. (it's "Multitude" for a reason). I leave it to people reading along to decide whether that's "easy" or not. Personally I find the constraints iron-tight; there's only one way out, and you have to figure it out from other songs first before you can pick your way through the minefield. But it's a good question. So this is the one that I don't quite have a good answer for yet (as I said, there are some rocky bits coming up). There are separately some interrogations, which occur earlier. But just as you say, that "takes the stand" is unambiguous and something that has to be explained, and like you I didn't understand how there could be a trial without a body. ... aaaand I just realized something, fuck. Buddymo, thank you. Before you posted I had already half written up the "third thing" that happens when it goes white, but with this line of questioning you made me realize that I missed something really important. I have to sleep on this to think it through, but, basically: We know there's no weapon because OftC tells us so. That's clear. We also know that Charlemagne isn't killed. But how do we know there's no body? What if I was wrong, and the "them" of "she saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk" [BCrosses] isn't "the guys" of "she saw the guys coming in from the sides," but the police, with a real body? Fuck, I'm so sad. I hope this is wrong, for the characters I mean, but I don't think it is. I've been staring at the screen for ten minutes, let me go ahead and post this and I'll come back tomorrow with the full thing when I've had a chance to really sift through it. You can probably see where this is going anyway, but now I really want to do right by it. Thanks for waiting out the rest of this, and thanks for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 2, 2016 1:15:25 GMT -5
The second major thing that happens when it goes white, and Charlemagne's image disappears for the last time, is that Charlemagne himself is "transformed"; unlike Mary, he is still Charlemagne inside, but his outward assumption of Gideon's identity becomes permanent. "Mystically or magically" (Craig from 2005 MAGNET interview, link), Gideon's urban myth has become real. This development is seen mainly in the identification of Charlemagne with Paul the Apostle. There's a song that was only played at a couple of shows (before it was either scrapped or renamed) called "Gideon's Conversion" (see this thread, and while I'm at it, another thread identifying "Sharp Cross" with Ascension Blues). We don't have the song but we've still got the title, and the title is interesting. "Gideon's Conversion" is a pretty good bet to allude to what is far and away the most important conversion in the history of the Church, namely, St. Paul's conversion, and sure enough, in CSTLN, we find both "sweet St. Paul, that must be the hardest luck saint of them all" and "if you don't get converted tonight" to indicate that this episode has some bearing on the story. The Wikipedia article "St. Paul's Conversion" ( link) gives the background to the story: Acts of the Apostles 9 tells the story of the conversion itself [Acts 9:3-9]: Many elements of this story are familiar from the songs: 1. "suddenly there shined round about him a light from heaven": that's the light of the projector shining around Charlemagne (Charlemagne-as-Gideon), see HSL: There are nights, there are nights, there are nights, there are nights Where it all comes on a little bit too bright There's a cross, there's a cross, there's a cross, there's a cross And in the center there is a hot soft light 2. "And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul ...": this is Charlemagne falling to the earth, see R&T: Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword Spooked by the spirit of Samuel You have to stop for a minute to really appreciate what Craig did there: we'd already noted that "Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword" was a double reference to King Saul of the Old Testament at both 1 Samuel 28:20 and 1 Samuel 31:4, and now we see that it's *also* a reference to the other Saul falling to the earth on the road to Damascus in Acts 9. Craig's not just writing a story full of double entendres --- he's finding a way to read the Bible as a book full of them too ... There are lots of different writers doing different kinds of things out there, and that's cool; but there are damn few who can see the world fall in line like this. 3. "And he trembling and astonished said, Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?": we don't get a view of Charlemagne saying this explicitly, but we do see that something has changed since his earlier refusal to bow down to the Lord in ABlues: I only bow down to the jetset They move so quick we haven't met yet and again in HSL: I was unfurling a flag of defiance aimed at my guidance guy 4. "trembling and astonished ... and when his eyes were opened, he saw no man": Charlemagne too was blind, high, and scared: I wasn't there I was blind, high, I was scared 5. "it shall be told thee what thou must do": a few verses later, the Lord tells Ananias what Paul's mission will be [Acts 9:15]: In the blinding light of the projector, the old Charlemagne died and was resurrected, born again with the new name of Gideon, and sent out in the world to preach the gospel --- that is, to spread the legend of Charlemagne's death. (We've already touched on this a bit, but this is a key theme of CSTLN.) To come full circle to "Gideon's Conversion": it's called "St. Paul's Conversion" because Saul was converted into Paul; in the same way it's called "Gideon's Conversion" because Charlemagne was converted into Gideon. We'll do a full run-through of CSTLN and HSL soon, after we get just a few more things squared away. In the meantime, we're finally able to appreciate the very literal meaning of "disappear" in the famous lines from Hostile, Mass. (actually muzzle saw this already, but I'm finally making a strict argument for it): I'll be damned if they didn't disappear. Wandered out of mass one day and faded into the fog and love and faithless fear. In the same moment of the crucifixion, Mary and Charlemagne as we know them both cease to exist; changed, they wander out of Gideon's mass to "fade into the fog and love and faithless fear." Way back when we first talked about Both Crosses, we pointed out that "She saw the angel put a sword in his side" [BCrosses] makes an allusion to the angel with a sword that presided over the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden [Genesis 3:24]. Now that we've finally unpacked the crucifixion scene, we can connect the dots and see that "wandered out ... into the fog and love and faithless fear" is written to fit this story as well. Charlemagne and Mary have been expelled from their Twin Cities paradise forever. The third thing that happens ends on a slightly more hopeful note; we'll pick that up tomorrow. Thank you for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Mar 1, 2016 1:36:05 GMT -5
Thanks, man. You've put your finger on a lot of things there! I can't get to all of it yet, but you'll see today that you were right about a lot of it, and there'll be more to come after that. Before I go farther with what happens in that last moment of the crucifixion, let me clear up something about the moment itself. I'm writing most of this stuff down for the first time, and even though I had worked out what happens, I hadn't actually blocked out the mechanics of the scene before last night. It wasn't until yesterday anyway that I thought much about what *physically* happens with the projector when things go white. I had initially imagined that it got brighter because Gideon raised the angle of the projection for an ascension effect, but after I wrote that down I realized that's impossible; the projection doesn't work without the screen on the fence. No, the reason it goes white for Charlemagne [HSL], the Narrator [SS], and Mary [AE] must simply be because the light changes while they are gathered together at ground zero. The Pepper's Ghost effect involves no bright light; it is the projection of an image filmed against a background of darkness. This means, then, that it must go white not gradually, but suddenly, like a film-reel projector when the film runs out. This would be consistent with the clicking and hissing of the projector. (The "hot and hissing" nights of Ambassador are related to their preparations working with it.) Which means in turn that the stuff about "laser lights" [NS] and "laser shows" [SPayne] is metaphorical rather than literal, and the "new device" [NS] is less about cutting-edge tech than it is about Gideon's stage-effect homebrew. Having had a day to think it through I'm satisfied with that. Apologies for not getting it right the first time. In any case, there are two big things that happen in this moment. (Three, in fact, but the whole point of the third thing is that nobody notices it.) The heavily foreshadowed one is about Mary, so let's start with that. In Crucifixion Cruise, where the POV character is the Narrator, we're told that Halleluiah came to in the confession booth Infested with infection Smiling on an abcessed tooth The "confession booth" is neither a confession to a priest nor a confession to the police, though Craig plays up both as possibilities (in HaRRF and DLME, respectively). The "confession booth" is in fact the same as the "video booth" of HaRRF, which is not a booth, either: it is Mary's *confession of love* to Charlemagne --- that is, to Charlemagne's Ghost, his image camouflaged in sweatpants, the beloved object of her 16 years of ecstatic visions. Mary kissed him, said "I love you too," and died. And Holly, in whose appearance she was wrapped, "came to" in her body. Mary's 33-year-old body is a wreck; she's infected with her cough and God knows what else, and her teeth are already going the meth mouth route. But 19-year-old Holly finds herself alive again, and smiles; it's good to be alive. This is Gideon's second magic trick. The mass of Holly's baptism is connected to the mass of Charlemagne's crucifixion, with Gideon presiding over both, by a literal "wormhole": Went to some movie. It was loud dumb and bloody. The third act took place in a wormhole. The hero ascended to heaven. Then we headed home. (The implication seems to be that the transsubstantiation of the Eucharist itself is a magic trick, by which the body of the bread is filled with the being of Christ ...) There is something a bit chilling about Holly's smile in Mary's body, flashed without a thought for its former occupant. But then we remember Mary's ruthlessness, how, to clear Holly out of the way, she basically sent her to her death. There's a lot to think about here. And it's not quite clear that Mary's truly dead. We understand now what the verse in Stevie Nix is about: She got confused about the truth She came to in a confession She got high for the last time in the camps down by the banks of the river Lord, to be thirty-three forever Again, "she" here is Mary. The "camps down by the banks of the river" are in Swede Hollow, the Party Pit; she was 33 when she got high there for the last time, just as she was 17 when she got high there for the first time. "She came to in a confession" (the line is located on the same album with "Hallelujah came to in the confession booth") is a piece of deliberate misdirection by Craig; it's true that it's the same event and the same confession, but it's described from Mary's side in SN, and from Holly's in CC. "She got confused about the truth" (referring to Mary, but from Holly's POV) suggests that it's not necessarily true that Mary is dead; it may be that she's just confused (there are signs of Mary's submerged presence later). But for now she's certainly gone. There's just an immense amount of evidence to go through at this point, but let me hold off on that. Instead, let's talk finally about *why* Mary would never let Charlemagne touch her. It's obvious now that Mary, having foreseen the crucifixion in detail since she was 17, knew that she would die the first time she touched (kissed) Charlemagne. Her decision to seize control of her envisioned fate (to make her own music, rather than being a DJ) is illustrated by the Narrator with the song "Self-Destruction" [R&T]; in retrospect we see what is foreshadowed there. And this isn't an arbitrary constraint. In the Gospel of John, we are told that Mary Magdalene is the first to recognize Jesus after his resurrection [John 20:11-17]: Jesus' "Touch me not," the Latin "Noli me tangere," is a famous and important theme in Christian art (wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noli_me_tangere). Below are the versions of Correggio, Fra Angelico, and Titian: Mary won't let Charlemagne touch her because she believes that he, her Christ, has commanded her not to touch him; an impossible situation. She holds out for as long as she can without losing either him or her own life. But when finally she is convinced that he will die without her help, she makes the choice for Self-Destruction in order to save him. That's the background behind the name of the song "Ascension Blues," and its original name, "Sharp Cross." The latter name seems to be a reference to Jesus' refusal of the sop of wine and myrrh before his crucifixion, which was offered to him to deaden the pain [Matthew 27:34], as described in an old Passion Week hymn: Fill high the bowl, and spice it well, and pour The dews oblivious: for the Cross is sharp, The Cross is sharp, and He Is tenderer than a lamb. The pain-deadener --- "And if it makes you feel a little bit better" --- is the consolation that "We're gonna all be friends in heaven"; but it's no consolation to Mary at all, who can only envy Jesse, loving and fucking Charlemagne: "To be young wild and pretty ... In the sweet part of the city" [ABlues]. The turnaround here, by which it's Mary who ends up rejecting the sop, and not Charlemagne, is not accidental: in the end it is she who is crucified, who dies on the projector-cross at 33, hands bleeding ("ascending into heaven dripping wet"), in order to save him. We're back to every single line opening up about 50 different things, but let me just cut it off there for tonight. Thanks for reading, and thanks for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 28, 2016 21:14:38 GMT -5
OK, crucifixion time. (Note: I made a major edit here about an hour after first posting ... eliminated some speculation about ascension. Writing this stuff out for the first time entails more seat-of-the-pants flying than I'd like, even if it's just in certain details. Apologies if the edit confused anyone.) I've noted before that there's almost nothing in the catalogue that directly describes the crucifixion. One for the Cutters directly mentions "the night with the fight," but it's mostly about the lead-in and aftermath. Both Crosses gives a lot of detail but it's mediated by a vision. What else there is, is even more remote. But we can piece it together. In fact, we pretty much already have. Let's set the scene: When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing The Skins have gathered in the Party Pit clearing (where the Swedehenge sculpture garden is today) in the northeast of Swede Hollow. 20 yards to the northeast is the water tower and the fence around it. 20 yards to the northwest is a short tunnel that crosses over Phalen creek and leads up from the pit to a parking lot behind some buildings on Payne Avenue. Whether identified with one of these particular buildings or not, this is where the Ambassador is located. Here's a simple view taken from Google Maps, annotated with red letters. C is the clearing with the water tower. B is the other side of the short tunnel, where the Ambassador and upper parking lot are. A is where the parking lot at the end of Payne Avenue is. I don't know which of the two parking lots Mary's car is parked in; her old habit "walk into the woods until she came to a clearing" [OftC] makes it sound like A, but B is just above the clearing. There may be more evidence to prefer one over the other that I'm blanking on right now. Where townies would gather and drink until blackout Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out We've mentioned this; the Skins are going to get completely wasted, a fact on which Gideon's plan relies. Windows wide open to let the hard rock in Theirs was a rage that didn't need much convincing The girls gave her glares but the boys were quite pleasant To be perfectly honest, they didn't seem much different The "windows wide open to let the hard rock in" line looks at first like it refers to car windows, but if that were right, it would run "to let the hard rock out," not "in." Reviewing the options it's clear that this must refer to the windows of the Ambassador, kept open to allow both the sounds of "hard rock" music from the club, and a supply of "hard rock" meth (this double entendre appears elsewhere in the BCamp liner notes, RP, Ambassador, the "Rocky Mountain High" metaphor in MM, C&N, etc.) down into the Pit. I think I haven't yet said this clearly, but I'm impressed by Craig's overall characterization of the Skins, as here. It would have been easy to make them straight bad guys, but he takes care to let us know that they're human, sometimes pleasant [OftC], occasionally vulnerable [LA, BBreathing] or religious [BCamp, LA], people with whom a complicated relationship is possible [IHTWTDFY]. They're not much different after all. Saddle Shoes tells us how the party gets started: That one guy in camouflage dancing There's a similar line in Sequestered in Memphis which is deliberately ambiguous, but can be understood to refer to the beginning of the party (more about this when we get to SiM): It started when we were dancing And in Hot Soft Light, Charlemagne-as-Gideon confirms it by denying it: I was France Ave when they came out dancing And that's all the information about the party as such that we get: there was drugs, music, dancing. We were told that things "kick[ed] off early" [LA], and it was still light when the Narrator got to the parking lot [SS]; but apparently the party went on normally until dark, because the next thing we hear about is the curtain going up on the show. Which unfolds like this. -------------------------- Gideon turns on the projector, and the screening begins. Charlemagne's Ghost appears at the fenced edge of the clearing, eerily lit, dancing. (Charlemagne's final scene, like his first, takes place underneath the spotlights.) The crowd begins to notice, and turns to watch. Mary-as-Holly walks up to him at the fence. He stops dancing. The Narrator-as-new-kid runs up and cries, "Don't do it!" The crowd falls silent. Solemnly, she leans into the fence and kisses Charlemagne's Ghost. In the silence, the clicking and hissing of the projector can be heard. Charlemagne's Ghost says, "I still love you, Judas." Charlemagne-as-Gideon runs at the Ghost with his knife drawn. The Ghost drops to his knees, arms out like Christ. The Narrator is all wrapped up in the show when he hears her say, "I love you too." Charlemagne-as-Gideon slashes at Charlemagne's Ghost, releasing a hidden bladder of blood as he drives the knife "home." From above comes Gideon's voice: "Hey hey, Providence: you gotta fall in love with whoever you can!" The light grows bright. Charlemagne-as-Gideon, the Narrator-as-the-new-kid, and the rest of the Skins fall backward in terror. Mary-as-Holly remains standing, her stitched and bandaged hands pointing up toward the light of the projector, bleeding for all to see. And then it went white. -------------------------- I'm just going to leave it there like that, without refs to songs. There's lots to explain, and we'll tie it all up as we go. Tomorrow: what happens in the moment that everything goes white. Thanks for reading along, I hope this is giving some satisfaction. If it is, and you can send something Still Alive Carl's way, thank you for that.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 28, 2016 2:46:47 GMT -5
Oh, man, thanks for this. I was typing up the stuff below offline and just logged on to post, and see this ... I'm falling asleep so I have to read it again tomorrow to see if I can make more of it, but yeah some of that is crazy. Lake Street! and "needles and pinners" puts some color on getting "pinned," for sure. That whole section with "I'm pretty nice to my Lake Street vices" is great. It really does read like hip hop. Let me check it out tomorrow when I can keep my eyes open. I double-checked the thing that I remembered as evidence for Mary and Charlemagne sharing a bed at the saddle shop, and it's more doubtful than I thought. So rather than try to pack it in here I'll deal with it in context later. This means we're ready to move on from the saddle shop. After fifteen days of waiting, it finally happens: the Skins get on the crosstown bus and head back down to the Party Pit. We're told about this in Look Alive (POV character is the Narrator). Wrecked and obsessed and set to attack Everything about him seemed ready to snap He said he only showed up cause he was hoping for a shoot 'em up He had blood on his boots and an arrow through his hat We've been over this a few times, but this is Shepard ("Shepard showed up then somebody took a couple shots" [SS]), coming off some Cowboys/Indians street-fight slaughter in the Indian Fringes. (There's an echo here of the lead-up to the metal bar beatdown; then, too, the Skins were "down on their luck and still high from a street fight" [BBreathing], with the implication that they'd been badly beaten: "all the living members of the Cityscape Skins" [C&N].) He's paranoid and he's obsolete I don't like the way he's looking at me It could set off any moment now Man, I've seen him destroy a dude before The chorus coming up tells us that they're on the bus, namely the crosstown Lake Street bus [SPayne etc.] heading east from Lyndale/Lake to St. Paul. The Narrator sees Shepard looking at him across the aisle and gets a cold feeling; he knows the guy is "ready to snap," and he's "seen him destroy a dude before" --- from which we understand that Shepard took the lead in bashing out Charlemagne's brains in the metal bar incident [SPayne]. Try to look alive and consider yourself someone that you love These bodies on this bus, it looks like they don't feel so good about themselves "Look alive" is sort of a play on the acting/reality hazard: they're headed down to the Pit make Charlemagne "look dead," but the Narrator's thinking they need to "watch out" or they really could end up dead. For the rest, we get the confirmation that they're on a bus, and that the Skins are coming off a defeat again. There's also the "bodies" tag that foreshadows their upcoming role in "the bodies [&] the blood" [BCrosses, 212M, etc.] of the crucifixion scene. Crosstown, everybody was pooling their money Rolling on down to the railroad yard It's the crosstown bus; they're headed down to the railroad-yard area [see YLHF] of St. Paul, located in "Hell" with Lowertown, Railroad Island, Payne Avenue, the camps, the banks of the river, and the Party Pit. Timing is everything and everything is kicking off early Heaven is a place where nobody's trying too hard "Timing is everything" because they've got a complex production to put on, and they can't do it until after nightfall (the projector and Pepper's Ghost effect require darkness). But things are "kicking off early," which could throw a wrench in the works. The Narrator doesn't like this high-stakes game; there might be a joke here, to the effect that he's something of a lazy type ("Heaven is a place where nobody's trying too hard"). They're shaky, but they're optimists They're dripping wet in western wear They hang up at the Methodist So hard to be a Christian soldier there We've been over this, too: they're dressed as cowboys, in blue jeans, and they hang up at Methodist hospital ("Onward Christian Soliders" refers to the hymn and the hospital's founding; see CSunrise, also AE) in St. Louis Park (near the Cityscape Apartments) and its rehab clinic. As in Sweet Payne, the Skins are "maxing out on medicine." A constant threat of ambush keeps them scared They cross themselves and mouth a hopeful prayer Deliver us from anxiety, protect us from discomfort Keep us floating up above the things that make us nervous Don't hurt us Again, the Skins are coming off a serious defeat in the cowboys/indians war, and they're fearing an "ambush." As suggested in Banging Camp, they're Catholic: they cross themselves, and recite an adapted version of the Catholic end of the Lord's Prayer ( wikipedia): We've discussed the particular meaning of "anxiety" in The Hold Steady songs, and in a few places "floating" is used to describe the feeling of being high in an otherwise bad situation [SA, GoaH, TOT, RH, Oaks, LA]. The prayer already has an ironic force in those senses. More to the point, if things go right, Christ will be appearing to them very soon. Try to look alive and consider yourself someone that you love These bodies on this bus, it looks like they don't feel so good about themselves Try to stay alive Take care of your bones and brains and blood Try to look alive and consider yourself someone that you love Again, with "bones and brains and blood," the Narrator is thinking of Charlemagne, and what happened to him the last time they "went down to the taverns" like this. He has to stay alive before he can pretend to be dead. While the Narrator-as-the-new-kid, Mary-as-Holly, and Charlemagne-as-Gideon are headed down on the bus with the Skins, something else is happening that is alluded to in Saddle Shoes: Oh, the wide open spaces Wild western and faithless Met this guy in the parking lot This guy I've seen at the saddle shop These lines appear sandwiched between one passage about filming in Gideon the "hesher's" apartment, and a second passage about the "blinding light" of the actual projection; "this guy I've seen at the saddle shop" places it near the end of the gap between those two events. There's only two "parking lots" in the story: one is the Southtown Shopping Center parking lot where they meet the dealer in Southtown Girls; the other is the place where Mary would "park by the quarry" [OftC] on her way to townie parties in the Party Pit. My reading is that this is the latter parking lot, and that "this guy I've seen at the saddle shop" is the real Gideon, who's driven down to the Pit in Mary's car. The evidence of just those lines is thin, but we also know that (1) the real Gideon has been around the saddle shop doing "shifts" with Charlemagne-as-Gideon; (2) the real Gideon has to get down to the Party Pit too; (3) the real Gideon can't be seen on the bus with Charlemagne-as-Gideon; (4) Mary's car has to be placed there for them to make their escape in, as prescribed by her vision [BCrosses]. The constraints are pretty tight, and something like this had to happen whether Saddle Shoes alludes to it, or not. More about what happens at the Pit tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and thank you for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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