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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 26, 2016 23:41:04 GMT -5
Thank you so much man! The awe should be directed at Craig, I'm just unraveling the threads here. I'm glad it's adding to your enjoyment of the catalogue, though.
I've remembered a handful of small but important things that I forgot to mention in recent posts, that I want to cover before we go down to the Party Pit.
The True Scene Leaders ------------------------------------
The song Stay Positive has a memorable series of "there's gonna come a time" lines. On the one hand these are prophecies from Craig Finn's experience, shared with us, the listeners, as something for the future. But they also map to different events in the story, and one of them sheds important light on the context of The Smidge.
There's gonna come a time when the scene'll seem less sunny It'll probably get druggy and the kids'll seem too skinny There's gonna come a time when she's gonna have to go With whoever's gonna get her the highest
There's gonna come a time when the true scene leaders Forget where they differ and get big picture 'Cause the kids at the shows, they'll have kids of their own The sing-along songs will be our scriptures
The first and especially the second "prophecy" refer, clearly, to things going bad with the drug scene back in the mid-90's timeframe of "Act II": the kids are too skinny, notably Holly with her "two cups of coffee and ten packs of sugar" [CatCT]; of course the time comes when she does go with Gideon and his supply of the truly strong stuff.
As for the third "prophecy," the time when the "the true scene leaders / Forget where they differ and get big picture" is the point where we are now, in the lead-up to the staged crucifixion. Charlemagne forgets his grudge against Gideon and comes to him for help [RH]; the Narrator, who's been nursing his own resentment and distrust of Gideon for years [HM, Ambassador], does the same. Together, they put aside their individual ideas of violent retribution [Ambassador, BBreathing] and "get big picture" about what they're trying to achieve.
The reason given for this change --- that "the kids at the shows, they'll have kids of their own" --- is a reference to Charlemagne and his "daughter" [CF] Jesse, the one with the "songs that everybody finally sings along" [CSongs]. The former kids, Charlemagne and Gideon and the Narrator, are grown up now; those sing-along songs have become their psalms [CSummer].
So when, in The Smidge, Charlemagne says to (absent) Jesse, "you can ask me not to do it but you can't contain the kids," we understand that he's talking about her, as much as about himself. An essential reason for doing what he's doing is that he knows nothing can stop what's coming with her and the kids at the harbor unless she leaves St. Paul, which she won't do until she stops waiting for him. Even if he's had to be dragged to this point unwilling, he sees that his disappearance can finally make that happen, so he accepts it.
Sixteen Nights at a Stretch ----------------------------------------
Another mystery that's cleared up by what we've learned of Charlemagne's time among the Skins is the business about Gideon being "always awake." There are several references to this:
- "And it's hard to stay in bed when half your friends are dead" [Knuckles] - "Two thousand kids won't get all that much sleep tonight" [MPADJs] - "That dude from your crew, who was always awake" [R&T] - "He stayed up for sixteen nights at a stretch, he was wrecked" [TL]
That last line about "sixteen nights at a stretch" is the giveaway; those sixteen nights are the nights corresponding (before and after) to their "fifteen days but it feels like forever" [SS] among the Skins. Which lets us guess at the explanation: when Gideon shaved Charlemagne's head, he shaved off his own hesher hair [SS] as well, and the two of them --- now hard to tell apart, and needing to avoid being seen together --- stayed awake in shifts for as long as they were waiting for the Skins to return to the Party Pit.
Chased Out from the Temple ------------------------------------------
There's another small but important detail in CatCT that I forgot to tie in; let me get that, and tie up a loose end from R&T at the same time. We looked at the following verse already:
We were nervous and restless, but not really bored We brushed our teeth, but it gushed from our pores Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword Spooked by the spirit of Samuel
Now we have the context to explain the first two lines. Again, R&T is sung from the POV of the Narrator, and he's here describing their experience at the crucifixion itself.
They were "nervous and restless" because they'd been waiting for fifteen days, under insane conditions, for the Skins to finally come down to the Pit (but by no means were they "bored").
The only substance that can both be brushed from teeth and also gush from pores is blood. They "brushed their teeth" in the sense that they were only pretending to be members of the "bloodsucking" Skins [Swish, BCamp, ASD, etc.]. It "gushed from our pores" because, like Christ in the garden of Gethsemane in the Kidron valley, they were sweating blood as the hour of the crucifixion arrived [Luke 22:44]:
We already talked about the Skins falling on the floor, spooked by Gideon's projection of the Ghost of Charlemagne: - We linked this to Judas and the officers of the temple falling backward in the garden, when Jesus identified himself to them. - We also linked it to the Biblical Gideon's rout of the Midianite army using only visual and sound effects (trumpets and torches). - What we forgot to mention is that this is also the point to which Gideon's favorite Biblical passage is connected: "He likes the part where the traders get chased out from the temple" [CatCT]. (As we noted earlier, Gideon's going to be presiding over mass again; the Party Pit is going to become a church for the evening.)
Killer Parties -------------------
Finally, it turns out I did forget a scene from the two week stretch in Gideon's Columbus apartment, after all. Besides the meeting in the back of the theater at the beginning of Banging Camp, there's another description of a meeting (probably the same one) between Charlemagne-as-Gideon and Mary-as-Holly in this timeframe, namely, the first three verses of Killer Parties:
If they ask about Charlemagne Be polite and say something vague Like another lover lost to the restaurant raids
And if they ask why we left in the first place Say we were young and we were so in love And I guess we just needed space We heard about this place they called the United States
And we found out Virginia really is for the lovers Philly is full of friendly friends that will love you like a brother Pensacola parties hard with poppers, pills and Pepsi Ybor City is tres speedy, but they throw such killer parties
Gideon's laid out the whole plan clearly: they're going to fake Charlemagne's stabbing and spread the rumor of his death. They know that the report of the "murder" will bring a police investigation. As the very publicly lead actress in the scene, "Holly" will be wanted for questioning. But there won't be a body or a weapon ("and they can't find the weapon" [OftC]); all she needs to do is provide vague, plausible answers ("no one says nothing" [OftC]), and she'll be able to walk away scot-free.
Here, then, Charlemagne is coaching "Holly" (Mary) on responses to the questions she's likely to get. What happened to Charlemagne? Be polite and say something vague, like "Another lover lost to the restaurant raids." Why did the two of you leave Lynn in the first place? Say, "We were young and so in love, and I guess we just needed space, and we heard about this place --- the opposite of Hostile, Massachusetts --- called the United States."
He then gets a little poetic thinking about the "places" they've seen. "Virginia" really is for the lovers --- their relationship was virginal (ambiguously true of Charlemagne and Holly, and also of Charlemagne and Mary). "Philly," of all the little "phillies" at the Yukon Club, was full of "friendly friends that will love you like a brother" (true of both Holly turning tricks with the Skins, and Mary crashing at the Ambassador with them). And "Pensacola / Ybor City" had lots of drugs, and the killer parties.
That's just about everything, now. Tomorrow we're getting to the Party Pit. Thanks for continuing to read, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 25, 2016 22:23:31 GMT -5
Hey, thanks, and don't worry about the workload! ... this one helps, in fact, because if I'm reading it right it tightens up the identification of "indian fringes" with Mary's "skimpy little outfits" line of revealing clothing. (I just looked up mini-thins too ... looks like a meth precursor?)
Plugging ahead: in AHfA we have the Narrator telling Charlemagne what to say if he hears from Jesse and she asks how he's doing; understandably, he wants to keep her out of it. What we have to go elsewhere to find out, is that Charlemagne (who also wants to keep her out of it) isn't in contact with Jesse at all. We had an idea of this already from Criminal Fingers:
They said they came to the place you're staying You went out the window and since then noone's seen you I wish that you'd think about your daughter 'Cause no girl needs her father riding around with Walter
She's seen him last on "Wednesday night" [CF] (while Mary was still down at the Ambassador), before he "went out the window" of the apartment on Columbus --- that is, before he disappeared into his role as Gideon, and they joined up with the Skins. And we know she's starting to worry that she won't see him again ("This time I don't think that I can wait for you"). But we have to listen closely for a clue to Charlemagne's intentions here:
I know the bar isn't safe But we should probably get together We should probably get our story straight 'Cause if they take you away This time I don't think that I can wait for you I'm all right ............ / ............. wait for you This time I don't think that I can wait for you I'm all right ............ / ............. wait for you This time I don't think that I can wait for you
The lines "I'm all right .. / .. wait for you" are sung oddly, as if a second voice singing "I'm all right" is coming in on top of the first one singing "This time I don't think that I can wait for you"; and I think that's exactly what's happening. Jesse repeats her line, while Charlemagne's voice, from some would-be telepathic distance, tries to let her know that he's all right.
This would be a shakier reading if The Smidge didn't document it in some detail.
We used to lie to each other about using computers. When we couldn't get it here we used to cruise to Vancouver. We used to lie to the people when we'd show up at parties. We used to pretend that we'd never met. And then you'd send a signal with your cigarette.
Charlemagne is talking to a Jesse (cigarette girl) who isn't there about their history together. I don't know what "Vancouver" is --- maybe over the border to the north, as in past the city limits to some dealer's house in "suburban Minneapolis" [HH]? Or maybe it has something to do with lying? But the main point is that they used to pretend not to know each other, and still had a secret way to communicate.
At first it felt like heaven. Then it felt just like The Whole. Let's roll. Let's roll around.
In those days it felt like Heaven [WCGT, HH, etc.], but since then it's been trending toward Hell (the "hole"). Hurricane Jesse's going to crash into the harbor this summer.
Now when we lie to each other we do it through computers. Now we never go dancing because we're not really moving. She's got a bandolero belt filled with Kamikaze shooters. She touches every table in a total eclipse. It costs an awful lot for just a little bit.
Jesse's starting to sound like Mary in Rock Problems ("she don't want to dance ... she wants to know what's going on in the room that's all the way in the back"). She's even beginning to deal in the restaurant where she works as a waitress [HJ, CSongs, etc.]; as she moves among the tables, she sells "Kamikaze shooters" (hard drugs from the bar [CSongs]?), like rounds in an ammunition belt ("she's the pistol at the party" [BCig]).
At first it felt like faith. Then it felt just like the void.
Again, it went from feeling like heaven to feeling like hell (the void) ...
Now we're stranded on the southside. So sick of waiting on your boys.
This gives us our timeframe. "Your boys" are "the boys that you met at the harbor" [HJ], or the Skins. "We" is Charlemagne, Mary, and the Narrator. They're stranded on the southside ("staying wherever" [SS]), at the saddle shop, waiting on the Skins to go down to the Party Pit so they can stage the crucifixion ("so sick" = "it's been fifteen days but it feels like forever" [SS], etc.). In other words this takes place shortly after the last time Jesse saw Charlemagne, the "Wednesday night" reported in CF.
Let's roll. Let's roll around. Let's go. Let's go back uptown.
He's wishing they could roll back the clock, and go back uptown, but he knows they can't ...
You can ask me not to do it but you can't contain the kids. We were living for the city. Now we're living for the smidge. We used to want it all. Now we just want a little bit. Living living living living living for the smidge.
and now he comes to the real issue. "You can ask me not to do it," he says --- you can ask me not to go fake my death and disappear --- "but you can't contain the kids," that is, you can't keep the Skins from coming after me. They used to live for the sweet part of the city, they used to want it all; now they'd be grateful for the smidge, to just to be able to keep a little bit of what they had.
Angel I didn't say goodbye. But I'm already gone.
This is the truth: he didn't say goodbye, but Jesse's not going to see him again. It's not what he wanted. But now his hand's been forced ("someone must have said something" [RH]), and it does solve the problem that he could never choose to solve on his own: without him there to hold her back, she'll go to New York ("this time I don't think that I can wait for you" [CF]) and get away from the harbor bars for good.
Come on, send me up a signal. Something to show me you're alright. Make the sign of the cross with your cigarette. Come on, smudge a little smoke up in the night.
There's a "slapped actress" effect here: they used to act as if they didn't know each other, and now it's become reality.
He's thinking "I'm all right" [CF] in her direction, and straining to hear "you're all right" [Smidge] from her too. He's looking for a smoke signal with the sign of the cross, the sign of resurrection, something to show deep down that she knows he isn't dead.
We're just about done with the stranded/waiting time. Thanks for sticking with it, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 25, 2016 0:03:37 GMT -5
Yeah, that's pretty amazing ... among parallels from The Hold Steady universe there's "scene reports," "blacked out in blue jeans," like you say the "black and tans," the "band," "war" and the waiting game, and even some more distant stuff like "vodka ice and gatorade." I mean I don't know what to make of it either, but I'm really curious to see whether these same building blocks get put together in support of some bigger thing, or some different thing, and in either case, what. Let me keep going with the incognito-among-the-Skins period. Another song that gives us some info about it is Going on a Hike (POV character is the Narrator). There isn't really any new information here, but there's reinforcement of some info we already have, and it's worth parsing: We come in to the prairie Waiting out in the heat The "prairie" is the Wild-West-themed area around the saddle shop, the Yukon club, and Lyndale and Lake; following the mountain/canyon metaphor of the song, it's somewhere in the middle, neither one nor the other; they're stuck, waiting, between Uptown/Lowertown. As noted above, this is the "waiting" time --- waiting for the Skins to go back down to the Party Pit. In the meantime they're having a pretty hot time of it, with Shepard and shots and cops and staying wherever [SS]. A couple motels and a couple saloons They can eat a couple of weeks up Living among the Skins means accompanying them as "they counted money in the motels / they mostly sold it on the malls" [SN], like the real Gideon and Holly used to do; we saw that counting money in the motels is alluded to in Saddle Shoes also: "Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up" [SS]. The "saloons" include the Yukon club, across the street from the saddle shop (and maybe the Round Up Saloon too, mentioned by Craig in the 2004 Cloak and Dagger interview: link). A "couple weeks" is the same "fifteen days" mentioned in Saddle Shoes. I saw a small town parade and the lead majorette She made me feel all weak in the knees The Narrator saw Mary there, identified by his memories of the prom; she's the "majorette" from OWL, who made him "weak in the knees" going down on her [MN]. Hard to say what the "parade" is. Hot shot in the city in the middle of the prairie Waiting out in the heat Same as above, but with the added indication that the "prairie" is in the city. Waiting out in the heat Cos you can't get to heaven from the cliche canyon You get tired when you're halfway up the mountain "You get tired" waiting; "it's been fifteen days but it feels like forever." Again, "halfway up the mountain" is their neither-here-nor-there station on Lake Street between Uptown and Lowertown. We get a massively more fun account of the same two weeks in Ask Her For Adderall. Here again the Narrator is the POV character; he's talking to Charlemagne about Jesse, and giving him some messages to pass on, in case he hears from her and she asks about him. The messages give a pretty good idea of just how insane things have been since they joined up with the Skins: If she asks, don't tell her that I'm living hand-to-mouth Don't tell her I've been sleeping on your couch If she asks just tell her that we opened for the Stones It's her favorite band except for The Ramones The "opened for the Stones" bit identifies the POV character as the Narrator; "favorite band except for the Ramones" (see also "favorite groups" [40B]) identifies "her" as Jesse. His "sleeping on your couch" identifies the person he's talking to as Charlemagne; disguised as Gideon (see below), he and Mary (disguised as Holly) are sharing a bed with a strict no-touching rule (not kidding, there is evidence for this; we'll get to it soon), while the third-wheel Narrator is on the couch. "Living hand-to-mouth" is just the beginning of the insanity ... If she happens to suggest a love based on trust and respect Tell her I've been wasted since last week If she wants to stop on by, tell her that I almost died Tell her I ain't seeing people yet But see if she'll send cigarettes He's been "wasted since last week"; they're near the end of the same "couple of weeks" and "fifteen days" described in GoaH and SS, respectively. There's been a lot of drugs ("wasted") and violence ("I almost died") in that time. The request for "cigarettes" further confirms that it's Jesse he's talking about. If she asks, don't tell her about the bloodshed in the streets The less she knows, the less she can repeat If she happens to bring up the pinpricks and the throwing up Tell her it's just part of growing up The "bloodshed in the streets" confirms that they've been caught up in the Skins' street fights (more than just the "couple shots" of SS). The fact that the Skins are in full Cowboy mode at this time, and that Shepard is shortly seen with "blood on his boots and an arrow through his hat" [LA], strongly suggests that the street fights in question are the ongoing wars in the "Indian fringes" [SPayne]. It's the combination of these facts: - that the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Mary are present for at least one of the Cowboys-Indians street slaughters [AHfA] - that Mary is referred to during this time as appearing "faithless in [implicitly Indian] fringes and feathers" [SS] - that the Narrator now "almost died" [AHfA] while Charlemagne "almost died up by Edina High" [HH] - that we have no other evidence of Charlemagne being near Edina High outside the closing lines of HH - that the title Hornets! Hornets! clearly associates the heavy stuff, including the Edina High episode, in suburban Minneapolis with the Skins (stinging insect metaphor) - that there is a warren of streets named after Indian tribes connecting Edina High with the frontage roads of 169, in the suburban fringes - that these streets are only a few (maybe 4?) miles SW of the Cityscape Apartments, about as far again as the Cityscape Apartments are from the saddle shop, and that Shepard is coming from that direction when seen with the arrow through his hat ... that leads me to at least entertain the idea (see the discussion of Cheyenne etc. a few weeks back) that the "Indian Fringes" refers to a definite place, and namely those streets in Edina (as well as to Mary's style of dress). I'm not making that call because it's insane. But I am saying it is fun as hell to look at. If she wants to get involved Tell her to stay in St. Paul Tell her I'm not up to taking calls But ask her for some Adderall "St. Paul" further confirms that this is Jesse [WCGT, CF], as does "Adderall" in conjunction with "Klonopins" further down. We remember that Jesse carries two kinds of pills; as described in SM it's "pick-me-uppers" and "put-me-to-sleepers"; in BCig it's "One to wake you up / One if you're nervous." Adderall is one of the former kind of pill, Klonopins one of the latter. Now Holly won't say hi to me 'Cause I'm in love with my anxiety Spectres gives us a technical definition of anxiety in the THS sense: Maybe our anxiety lives in the spaces in between who we really are and what we want to be and the things that we let other people see GoaH, which relates to this same period with the Skins, ends with a pair of lines on the same theme: But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself And in Rock Problems we already noticed Mary's impatience with the Narrator and his persistent unhappiness with the life that he's chosen. Putting these things together, it's clear what this means: "Holly" (Mary) won't talk to the Narrator, because he's too hung up on the difference between who he is and who he wants to be; like it or not, he's a hanger-on among the Skins now. If she asks just tell her that we're too far gone to deal She should know exactly how that feels If she wants a scene report, don't tell her about the kicked-in doors Tell her we ain't even keeping score no more The "kicked-in doors" could be a reference to the cops showing up at the apartment on Columbus approximately two weeks previously, but "keeping score" (after BBreathing, C&N, IHTWTDFY, etc.) is clearly a reference to the Skins' violent exploits, and "kicked-in doors" likely is too. If she wants to help the cause Tell her we need sterile gauze Tell her she should look through all her medicine And she if she's got Klonopins If Jesse wants to help, she can send sterile gauze; the Narrator and Charlemagne are frantically trying to keep Mary's stigmata from giving them away (this is where Charlemagne's "bleaching out the bloodstains" [GLS], and "keep your bandages clean" [SS], come from). Now Charlemagne don't seem the same He's skinny, scared and off his game He's been hiding from those gentlemen With the same tattoos as Gideon And the end is fun too: Just like "she don't look like that same girl we met" [FN], "girl, I've seen your friend, she looks nothing like Jada Pinkett" [SPayne], and "she just seemed distant and different" [OftC], "Charlemagne don't seem the same" turns out to be a strictly literal reference to his looking like someone else, because he's disguised as Gideon. And the last two lines are an awesome bit of misdirection: he's been hiding from those gentlemen (who are still looking for him [RH, CF]) in the last place they, or the listener, would ever think to find him, namely, *right in their midst*. Ask Her for Adderall is another favorite, and musically, too. There are a few places around the songs where Galen's basslines start channeling some kind of antigravity power, and that break before the "too far gone to deal" line never fails to hit liftoff. All right, more tomorrow. Thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl if you can, and thanks for sticking with it this far.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 23, 2016 23:53:44 GMT -5
Yeah, I know exactly what you mean. Fortunately, I don't think it's that bad --- Banging Camp is a real outlier, and even that has clear clues: the tattered outfit (Mary), the back of the theater (Mary), the Narrator following at a distance (Mary), the strange exchange of self-introductions between Holly and Gideon ("Holly" and "Gideon"). As we move forward things will generally be clearer; offhand, I can't think of anything ahead of us that isn't pretty tightly constrained. For the rest, I think you can have confidence that Craig's control over the story is going to exclude unsatisfyingly arbitrary readings. So at worst, if I screw it up and go with a reading that looks too "easy," you can toss that out and look for a better one, or you can call me on it. I said I would pick up the "black and tans" thing today. This is another metaphor for the Skins: in Knuckles we're introduced to them as "militiamen" at war with the law; the Black and Tans ( wikipedia) were an English paramilitary force stationed in Ireland from 1919-22 for the purpose of fighting the Irish Republican Army. There are a few references to "black and tans" in the songs, as well as a few related allusions. In Curves & Nerves, Making love with the black and tans can be read as "drinking a lot of black and tans," in the sense of the beer drinks made of layered ale and stout ( wikipedia); but the secondary implication is that she's turning tricks with the Skins, which after all she is also doing [Swish, C&N, etc.]. The dealer in Southtown Girls is identified as a gangster both by his "Hey Bloomington" style of speaking, and his black and tan colors: Meet me right in front of the Rainbow Foods I got a brown paper bag and black buckle shoes In Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night, the "Irish" are the Irish cops of Nelson Algren's Chicago, as opposed to the English militiamen of the Black and Tans; the switch from English William Blake to Irish Yeats, as we've already seen, represents the switch from taking end-times violence to the Skins, to taking an urban myth to the cops. (I did already mention that Charlemagne's "bleeding from the holes in his story" comes with his interrogation by the cops.) These are some pretty damn impressive symmetries, and this isn't even all there is to it. We'll talk about this a lot more when we get to Charlemagne's arrest, and to CSTLN. (Here's a fun one: in CSTLN, we get the following lines: Hey Nelson Algren, Chicago seemed tired last night They had cigarettes where there were supposed to be eyes Hey William Butler Yeats, all the Irish seemed wired last night They tried to separate our girls from our guys If you assume I'm right about Irish/Chicago being the cops, and the cigarettes glowing red in the darkness because they're behind an interrogation lamp, what does "They tried to separate our girls from our guys" refer to? I'm looking for a three-word phrase that gets repeated like 10 times, so it's not obscure ...) Finally, there's "When they say black and tans" of Banging Camp. This is another over-the-top backwards joke: "great white sharks" and "killer whales" are supposed to be cryptic supremacist gangland allusions, but "black and tans," a straight-up fascist paramilitary handle (and used with that meaning in C&N), just refers to the drink. Fantastic stuff. All right. Charlemagne stays at Gideon's apartment on Columbus for two weeks, then the cops track him down and he disappears. We know that he's cut his hair and is now pretending to be Gideon. What happens next? The main thing that happens is that Charlemagne-as-Gideon, Mary-as-Holly, and the Narrator-as-the-new-kid join up with the Skins both to make themselves known again, and to wait for the next party at the Party Pit, where they can execute their plan and fake Charlemagne's death once and for all. There are a few songs that tell us about this period. One of them is Saddle Shoes. The POV character here is the Narrator, disguised as the "new kid": Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up He's coming off some problem block Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot We're sleeping at the saddle shop Again, the "saddle shop" is the Schatzlein Saddle Shop at 413 Lake Street (at Grand and Lake), kitty-corner from the Yukon Club, and two blocks east of Lyndale and Lake where the Skins are dealing "silver metal flake" [R&T]. This is middle-country on Lake Street, about a mile west of Gideon's apartment on Columbus and a little less than a mile east of Charlemagne and the Narrator's apartment on Hennepin. We've already talked about Shepard. The really interesting line here is "Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot": the Narrator, terrified that they're going to get caught, is anxiously watching Mary break character; instead of retreating into awkward silence as Holly does when she gets high [BBlues, BCamp], she wants to talk a lot. It's been that kind of summer We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever I'm not sure what to do with "summer" here --- I had forgotten about this. Muzzle already guessed that the crucifixion happens at the "Easter mass" of HaRRF, and that's right; I've been taking "Easter" (and the cold days of Ambassador) literally and assuming we are presently in mid-April. But that's a bit early for summer. Maybe "summer" here is figurative, or maybe "Easter" is (the constraining dates work out either way). Or maybe there's another explanation. "We tried to stay with your sister" means that they tried to stay with Mary, the real Mary ("Holly's" "sister" on account of the fact that "Holly's" real identity is Mary; this reading is confirmed below). They tried to stay in Mary's room down at the Ambassador, to be close by the Party Pit for whenever things finally kick off; but they've ended up getting dragged along with the Skins from wherever to "wherever." The "fifteen days" is key; this links Saddle Shoes with a couple of other songs describing the same time period. It "feels like forever" because they've been living through total insanity among the Skins; some of that is described with "somebody took a couple shots / the neighbors went and called the cops" below, but there's a lot more elsewhere, which we'll pick up in the next day or two. The Wild West begins where your body ends So keep your bandages clean The Wild West begins right where your body ends Blacked out in blue jeans Here the Narrator is addressing Mary: he warns her, "the Wild West begins right where your body ends / Blacked out in blue jeans"; "blacked out in blue jeans" is a description of the Skins, "dripping wet in western wear" [LA], in the Party Pit, "Where townies would gather and drink until blackout" [OftC]. We remember too that the C&N "video" version of the crucifixion involved "screams and jeans and curves and nerves": the screams are to come when they see the ghost and the murder; these are the jeans. And because they are all around her, the Narrator is begging Mary to stay powered down and not let her stigmata bleed, which will give them all away. Shepard showed up then somebody took a couple shots The neighbors went and called the cops Didn't make a difference when the owners came and changed the locks We still sleep at the saddle shop It's been that kind of summer We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever She appeared faithless in fringes and feathers It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever More Shepard, more violence. The "sister" is now identified as the girl who appeared faithless in fringes and feathers; we recall that this was Mary, the "white swan" of SN, at Holly's party with the tattered white T-shirt saying "what would Judas do?" The song goes on with the bit we've already seen about the filming in Gideon's apartment, and some information about the crucifixion itself. But there are two more things that relate to this intermediate period that we should deal with here: Nine stitches and bandages This is apparently why Charlemagne and Mary went to see the "doctors" as reported in Runners High: they wanted to get the stigmata stitched up to prevent her from giving herself away by bleeding. However, this measure seems not to be working very reliably; and the expression "nine stitches" itself (as in the saying "a stitch in time saves nine"; wiktionary) suggests that it's a case of too little too late. I never rode a horse but I'm sleeping at the saddle shop And so are most of my friends The Narrator, Charlemagne and Mary are there; only Gideon and Jesse are missing. (Alternatively, in view of their disguises, he may be counting Charlemagne, Gideon, Mary, and Holly as being there, and in that case Jesse is the only one who isn't sleeping at the saddle shop. More on her tomorrow.) I don't think I'm getting the best results writing so late but there's still a lot of ground to cover, so let me run with this. Thank you for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 23, 2016 1:21:59 GMT -5
Ha, thanks man, I'm glad this is stirring up a fresh look at the music. And yeah, I always liked Sweet Payne a lot, but I know exactly what you mean about Sketchy Metal and Knuckles. For my money Knuckles is a real sleeper --- of all the songs it seems almost too simple to bother with, but every so often I get a major surprise coming back to it. There's one big thing that comes in to play after the crucifixion that I just noticed like a month ago. We'll get there pretty soon.
Let's recap to see what we're missing. The whole point of staging the crucifixion is to take control of the fulfillment of Mary's vision themselves; that means reproducing every element of it exactly. So, over to Both Crosses for a checklist:
She saw all the footage right before it got cut She saw all the bodies and she saw all the blood She saw the angel put a sword in his side Baby, that's how we got canonized
So far we're not missing any elements of the plan. We do want to stop to appreciate a few other things though:
- the double entendre of "footage" and "cut" (how many layers of pun are there in "cutters" now?), and "canon"-ized, since they're actually screening a film. (There ought to be a word for this kind of thing, where Craig seems to be using a metaphor or an expression, but in fact is speaking literally ...) - the "bodies" and "blood": it appears that Gideon will be presiding over another mass (muzzle, you called this). - the "angel": we already talked about Gideon as the angel of Death, and the angel with the flaming sword at the entrance to Eden, but it's good to keep these in mind as we get into the crucifixion itself.
She saw him gushing blood right before he got cut She saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk She saw the guys coming in from the sides Baby, that's how we get energized
Once again we've been set up by an earlier line ("she saw all the footage before it got cut") to miss at least some of the literal meaning of "she saw him gushing blood right before he got cut"; of course, Charlemagne released the special-effects blood before he was ever actually cut. At any rate, they're going to need some blood for the stabbing scene.
Similarly, the first time we hear "She saw them put a body in a bag in the trunk / She saw the guys coming in from the sides," we imagine that this is a vision of the Skins preparing to dispose of the body, and closing in on the victim from the sides (never mind that the order of the two events is backward). But now that we know Charlemagne and the others are staging the scene themselves, we understand what's really happening: it's they who are spiriting away the evidence of the "body." Which means they'll need a bag (which is trivial), and a car. Of course, Mary's the one who has a car [TSPotC, OftC]. Her vision of "the guys coming in from the sides" is a view from the driver's seat of her own friends piling into the backseat to make their escape.
She saw the film right before it came out At first she thought Judas might go for the mouth She saw the nails. She saw the hands She saw the crowd. She heard the band
We need to pause a moment to pay respect to the world-class line "At first she thought Judas might go for the mouth." But having done that, we know what else we're missing now. They're going to need Judas. Back in the Milkcrate Mosh timeframe, Judas was Holly, and there are a lot of "wiped at her nose and she winked" occasions (still to come) which hint at another occasion for betrayal on her part. The only problem with this is that Holly's long gone.
But we've just concluded that Mary's going to be at the scene. And Mary's Holly's cousin.
In the same way that people haven't seen Gideon for seven years, making a Charlemagne/Gideon double passable, no one's seen Holly for seven years either.
And so it turns out that the First Night lines
Holly's insatiable, she still looks incredible But she don't look like the same girl we met
are **strictly literal**. Mary will be down with Charlemagne on stage, playing the role of Holly.
We'll skip "she saw the nails. She saw the hands" for now. But "she saw the crowd. She heard the band" is important. The crowd is the crowd of Skins all around them, their audience. And the band [YGD, CSTLN, HSL, TSPotC, A&H, OWL] is the Narrator ...
The new kid begged them not to do it Jesus just said, "I still love you Judas Since you've been up in Massachusetts I keep dreaming about dos cruces"
Following on "she heard the band," we understand that "the new kid" is the Narrator; Holly (played by Mary) and Gideon (played by Charlemagne) both have histories with the Skins, so they can pretty much pick up where they left off. But the Narrator, whose help they need both to help carry the "body" bag, and to raise the dramatic pitch of the staged event, has to establish a role for himself as the "new kid."
So this takes us (if I haven't forgotten something) to the last remaining scene from the two weeks that Charlemagne is staying with Gideon on Columbus, namely, the Banging Camp theater episode.
The POV character of Banging Camp is the Narrator. The song starts with him having accompanied Mary and Charlemagne to the theater, where the two of them are sitting in the back, rehearsing for their imminent "re-entry" into the world of the Skins. The idea is that they'll reintroduce themselves to the gang and then bide their time, in the relative safety of the gang's company, until the next party down at the Party Pit, where they'll finally put their plan into action.
Holly wore a string around her finger She said it helps her to remember all the nights that we got over And besides, it ties her outfit all together Holly wore a string around her finger
"Holly" (Mary) wore a string around her finger to help her remember all the things she's supposed to remember as Holly, including the nights of the years that she was gone. Besides, it ties her outfit all together; Mary's rehearsing the role of Holly, but she's still dressed like Mary, in her "standard issue" skimpy clothes [HM, BCamp, SPotC, NS, Weekenders].
There are strings attached to every single lover But they still can't even tether us together Listen to the back of the theater, I think they really love one another There are strings attached to every single lover
There are strings attached to every single lover, the Narrator thinks, but even so they aren't enough to keep him connected to Mary (see "tethered" [TOT]). Listen to Mary-as-Holly and Charlemagne-as-Gideon talking in the back of the theater, he thinks, sounding just how he and Mary did when they used to spend time back there, not messing around, but just talking [HM, AE], as if in fulfillment of Christ's command to love one another as He has loved us [John 15:12]; they're sounding like they really love one another, even though they're rehearsing the roles of a different pair of lovers entirely.
When they say great white sharks They mean the kind in big black cars When they say killer whales They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in penetration park
Charlemagne, in Gideon's voice (see the "black and tans" lines below), is practicing the Skins' slang, as taught to him by Mary. "When the Skins say 'great white sharks', they mean the kind in big black cars; when they say 'killer whales' they mean they whaled on Charlemagne until they killed him up in Penetration Park" (this last in reference to the metal bar beatdown).
"Great Red Shark" and "White Whale" are the names of the two cars driven by the main characters of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (also referenced in C&N, and possibly in a few other songs).
It's worth underlining that these lines are actually the Narrator quoting Charlemagne imitating Gideon repeating after Mary. There are reasons why it's such a difficult song to parse ...
Holly wore a cross to ward them off She said if they think you're a Christian then they won't bring in the dogs And if they think you're a Catholic then they'll want to meet your boss Holly wore a cross to ward them off
The Narrator continues: "Holly" (Mary) wore a cross to ward the vampire (biting insect metaphor) Skins off; she said if they think you're a Christian then they won't bring in the dogs to attack you (compare the later IHTWTDFY, where they're actually "building a bunker down by the river"); and if they think you're a Catholic then they'll look on you with actual favor, and will welcome your guy" --- Charlemagne-as-Gideon, in this case. (Again this is all Mary reporting on the Skins, whom she knows well.)
Yeah, there's camps down by the banks of the river And it's sketchy in the night but they mostly lay low in the light Hey sweet recovery, come on, won't you wade into the water with me? You know, there's camps down by the banks of the river
The Narrator continues for two lines, setting the scene of the riverbank events, and then Charlemagne speaks again, imitating Gideon speaking to Holly at the time of the baptism; this part we've covered.
When they say black and tans You know they mean the kind from the cans We don't got time to mix it all together I'm a very busy man, man
Again Charlemagne practices their slang, in Gideon's voice. (The black-and-tans metaphor is something we should expand on --- running out of gas now, I'll do it tomorrow.)
She said I dig those awkward silences 'Cause I grew up in denial and went to school in Massachusetts He said hi, I like to party on the problem blocks And I can't stand it when the banging stops
And finally, one more exchange, this time quoting "Holly" (Mary) directly rather than paraphrasing her speech: she practices a two-line vignette of herself as Holly, in Holly's voice, and Charlemagne does the same for himself as Gideon, in Gideon's voice. We've already explored the meaning of what they're saying; the important thing now is to undrestand the reason for their saying it, to see that they're settling into their roles. They're pretty much ready to go now.
Falling asleep so I'll stop there. On to the next stage tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and again for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 21, 2016 20:27:23 GMT -5
There's a bit more from the two weeks on Columbus Ave that I need to wrap up, including a couple of minor things that I forgot in passing. Let me start with those and then get back to the big picture. Preparation for the show ----------------------------------- Going through The Ambassador we skipped the nights/days bits, but we can look at those now: The nights were hot and hissing like an iron. The days spent climbing walls like a vine. ... The nights were hot and hissing like an iron. The days were cold and crushed you like a can. Years spent faking pain and making plans. These lines refer to the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon's preparations for the show they're going to put on. "The days spent climbing walls" refer to climbing the water tower in the Party Pit. "The nights were hot and hissing" refer to building and working with the projector. We don't have a lot of evidence for the "hissing" of the projector now, but we'll pick up more later. "The days were cold" because it's still March; spring is coming but just getting started (and they're outdoors climbing the tower during the day, whereas their night work with the projector was "upstairs in some hesher's apartment" [SS]). The anxiety and anticipation made the two weeks seem like years (in the same way that "hours" and "months" and "years" in Multitude of Casualties are all used to refer to the same period of time); they got through it faking pain "to get a prescription" [GoaH], and making their plans. Constructive Summer is about them actually climbing the water tower; the second verse has a couple of great lines in it: This old town is lifeless Been that way our whole lives, just Work at the mill until you die Work at the mill and then you die The water tower is at the southern end of Hamm's Brewery, originally both a brewery and flour mill ( wikipedia); "mill" is a reference to this. (The Brewery was abandoned in 2004, when this scene takes place; it's not absurd for them to be working up there in broad daylight.) The particular insistence on "and then you die" is an in-joke; the Narrator is referring to the fact that they're going to finish their "work" setting up the theater, and then Charlemagne is going to "die." Biblical parallels ----------------------- In talking about the Skins "falling on the floor" at the sight of Charlemagne's spirit, I forgot to mention that there's a Biblical allusion here too. In the garden, when the officers with Judas come up to arrest Jesus (and Peter draws his sword), Jesus identifies himself [John 18:6]: This isn't just a one-off parallel; as we'll see, practically every aspect of the crucifixion scene is related to Craig's Twin Cities rewrite of early church history. The magic trick ---------------------- Back to the plan. There are actually two distinct parts to Gideon's magic trick: 1) creating the special-effects "ghost" of Charlemagne. 2) propagating the rumor of his death. In relation to the second, there's one verse of Stevie Nix that we still haven't looked at, a passage in which Holly describes Mary speaking to Gideon: She said you remind me of Rod Stewart when he was young You've got passion and you think that you're sexy and all the punks think that you're dumb The guys around the lockers got a story about the stomach pump And the guys behind the theater found a body in the garbage dump In the context of Holly's party, this has a straightforward meaning. The punks on the front lawn are making jokes about Gideon, calling him Stevie Nicks because of the magician's cape and the "white bird" on his arm. But Mary says he reminds her more of Rod Stewart: - He's got passion and thinks he's sexy, maybe because of the psycho eyes [Swish, BBreathing, etc.], more likely just because he's high on speed & looking for sex [SN, MM, etc.] (compare the Stewart songs Passion and Do You Think I'm Sexy). - He's trying to attach a myth to himself, that he's a tough guy and a killer [Knuckles], with the help of a story about guys behind the theater finding a body in the garbage dump (compare the myth about the stomach pump attached to Stewart). Mary's only just said the last line, when the music slows and gets funny. It's not clear if she's having a prophetic moment, or if her words have some independent suggestive power. But either way, they foreshadow the future in which it will be up to Gideon to create the myth of Charlemagne's crucifixion. This link between Gideon's "magic trick" and myth-creation is indicated both by the Stevie Nix long black shawl context, and by The Ambassador, in which it's noted that his trick involves something more than special effects: Man it feels kind of magical. I guess your friend can really move things with his mind. But the link is drawn much more strongly by Craig himself in the 2005 MAGNET interview ( link). Speaking of Separation Sunday, he says: There it is, apropos of Stevie Nix, in Craig's own words: urban myth is magic. Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night makes clear that Gideon's hand in propagating the myth --- the gospel of Charlemagne's crucifixion --- is another function of his role as the Holy Spirit. (See the account of Pentecost [Acts 2], in which "the Holy Ghost" came with a sound like "a mighty wind" to fill the Apostles, led by Peter, on the day that they began preaching to the world.) Nelson Algren came to Paddy at some party at the Dead End Alley Yeah, he told him what to celebrate And I met William Butler Yeats, Sunday Night Dance Party, summer 1988 At first I thought it might be William Blake We mix our own mythologies, we push them out through PA systems We dictate our doxologies and try to get sleeping kids to sit up and listen And I'm not saying we could save you, but we could put you in a place where you could save yourself If you don't get born again at least you'll get high as hell The POV character is the Narrator, speaking from a later time, having left the Twin Cities to go to New York. He begins by recalling that the spirit of Nelson Algren (author of Chicago: City on the Make) came to Paddy of Dillinger Four at a party at the Dead End Alley, and told him what to celebrate. This frames the key idea of the song: being in a band is an apostolic office; you receive the gospel ("came to Paddy ... told him"), and you spread it ("what to celebrate"). The Narrator, too, like Peter at Pentecost, has been called by the Spirit (again, Gideon as the Holy Ghost [SM, BCamp, A&H, etc.]). He first met Gideon at a Youth of Today show at the 7th Street Entry "Sunday Night Dance Party" in the summer of 1988 (the liner notes have "YOT??" next to this line; the same Youth of Today show is described in BBreathing). At first he thought Gideon's gospel might be the "violent red visions" of William Blake's Revelation [CatCT], a call for war of revenge on the Skins ("war" [CatCT vs. Knuckles, GLS], "revenge" [C&N, Ambassador], "vengeance" [HSL]); but it turned out to be the myth-mixing of William Butler Yeats instead. (BBreathing has a parallel account of these two impressions; there's the violence of the "Youth of Today" concert at their first meeting, and the non-violence of "Shelter" on their second encounter. This is analogous to the double-take described in Knuckles, too: Gideon's been trying to get everyone to call him tough guy names, like "Freddy Knuckles," but instead they keep pegging him as a softie, like "Right Said Fred.") There's more to the early church history parallel, but we'll save the rest for the crucifixion itself. Here are three of William Blake's "Great Red Dragon Paintings" of scenes from the Book of Revelation ( wikipedia), alluded to in "William Blake" [CSTLN], "violent red visions" [CatCT], and "Revelation songs" [CF]: The Number of the Beast is 666 The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun That's enough for today. Tomorrow I should be able to wrap up the Columbus Ave period and start on the next episode. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 20, 2016 22:04:42 GMT -5
The level of care he's put into his work is off the charts. Sometimes it makes me laugh how easily things seem to fall into his hand; the Ray Cappo story, for example, with "Shelter" and "Krishna" and the "7th Street Entry" --- I mean, come on, how the fuck did he do that? There's just a massive amount of attention to detail there, both in looking at things around him for material, and in crafting his own stuff.
And not just for the story, but for the sound, too. I used to listen to a lot of Dylan years back, and as good as he is, he used to piss me off sometimes with his just-write-whatever-you-want-to-say-and-it'll-fit approach (I remember a quote about some friend watching him crank out the lyrics to Brownsville Girl, I think it was, reading over his shoulder; at one point the friend said "hey, that doesn't fit the rhythm" and Dylan said "don't worry, it'll work out" and just kept typing. In Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, he's got one verse that opens with a line of 18 syllables crammed in on top of each other, while the next opens with a line of only 11, dragged out to cover the gaps between notes. Craig never does that. He treats every note like an opportunity. That was something that blew my mind the first time I heard YLHF, Tad kept grooving those fat pitches and Craig squared up on every single one of them ("damn right you'll rise again," "I'm kinda saving myself for the scene," and "there were just too many kids" ... I mean, are you fucking kidding me).
You can put some Didion topspin on it, tell yourself "I write to find out what Craig Finn's thinking" :-)
There's a lot of stuff about the crucifixion and so many moving parts ... I'm sure there's a best way through it, but I don't know what it is. Let me keep going with what's in front of me.
So, they're going to fake Charlemagne's death; the goal is to make him disappear so that both the cops and the Skins will stop looking for him. They're going to set up a "play" in which he (in reality, his projected image) appears to be stabbed, and people will believe that he was killed, that's great. But he's still alive. So how does he disappear?
There's no end of clues about this, but I think it was listening to One for the Cutters that let me see it the first time:
The night with the fight and the butterfly knife Was the first night she spent with that one guy she liked ... The girl takes the stand and she swears she was with him Her father's lawyers do most of the talking
We've seen all the stuff about Cherry from the Outsiders, siding with greaser Johnny after he stabs her boyfriend, so we're prepared for most of the above --- except for one part of it: "that one guy she liked." That bit is strange; we know there's only one guy Mary likes, and that's Charlemagne, the victim.
Of course he's not really the victim, since it's his image that gets stabbed, not him.
Which, come to think of it, means that he's available to play a different role in this production.
And that's what happens. While Gideon's on top of the water tower directing the show, Charlemagne's down on the stage, with his head shaved, playing the role of Gideon.
Where to start? There was the line from Saddle Shop I quoted yesterday; after they finish filming Charlemagne for the magic trick, we get
The other guy was licking his knife
which is a description of Gideon preparing to use his knife. Then we can go to Runner's High for a bust-out-laughing shot of him using it:
Dude you've got to sit still if you want me to save you.
It's just what it sounds like ... Charlemagne's bouncing around like a little kid while Gideon's giving him a haircut.
You see where this is leading, right? Charlemagne is going to have to assume the role of Gideon, not just for the night of the crucifixion, but both before and after it; before, so that "Gideon" can reappear from his years of exile at the tire shop and get back in with the Skins; after, because that's going to be his identity for as long as the search for Charlemagne is still going on.
The result is that we're treated to a few songs in which the voice is the voice of Gideon, but it's really Charlemagne speaking. Not to jump ahead, but after the crucifixion, some stuff happens which results in Charlemagne getting stopped by the cops under suspicious circumstances. Unfortunately for him, at the time (as noted at the end of CiS), he's got some sweet stuff tucked into his socks:
I got stopped by the cops and they found it in my socks And I got probed
and so the cops decide to hold him for interrogation ... Muzzle, this is for you:
They put the screws into Charlemagne He had a detox dream he saw Christ in all his glory Charlemagne didn't feel any pain But he's bleeding from the holes in his story
He said, "Hey my name's Corey. I'm really into hardcore. People call me Hard Corey. Don't you hate these clever people And all these clever people parties"
That's Charlemagne with the cops, doing his best lost-his-mind-when-they-jumped-him-in Gideon imitation. But it's a pretty shaky story, and he's not going to talk his way out of it ...
While we're here, take note of that "Hey" --- that's pure Gideon style, in imitation of the gangsters, like the "Hey Bloomington" dealer who Charlemagne meets at the Southtown Shopping Center in SG. All of the following are Gideon, or Charlemagne imitating Gideon:
- Hey, my name's Corey [HM] - Hey hey, Providence [SK] - Hey, sweet recovery [BCamp] - Hi, I like to party on the problem blocks [BCamp] - Hey, New York City [ASD]
Some impressive shit there. Not everybody can write so much with an offhand syllable.
To bring this detour full circle, we get a view of the interrogation itself in Hot Soft Light, another crazy ass-backwards truth-in-insanity epic; one of the crazy Gideon-things Charlemagne says, which however happens to be strictly true, is
I was Lake and Columbus, I was cutting off all my hair
So, yeah, the haircut took place in Gideon's apartment (this confirms, too, that the apartment is located with the tire shop on the Lake Street end of the divided block). And take another look at OftC, where Mary is thinking about "that one guy she liked." Here Craig sets us up again with an expert piece of misdirection early on:
The girls gave her glares but the boys were quite pleasant To be perfectly honest, they didn't seem much different
The townies weren't that different from people like her, right? Right, they aren't that different. But a few lines later we get the same words with a totally different meaning:
He didn't seem that different except for that blood on his jacket He didn't seem that different except for maybe his haircut He didn't seem much different
Charlemagne didn't seem that different **from his former self**, except for the blood on his jacket, and of course the haircut.
At this point it's clear that Charlemagne is the "guy who looks like Mickey Mantle" with the buzz cut in Hostile, Mass., getting tangled with his own image in the electrical fence at the edge of the clearing in the Party Pit.
Muzzle, as you know I hadn't heard of Just Saying until you pointed it out to me, and it's true that I don't think it's a source of new info about the story; but knowing that Charlemagne ends up as a doppelgaenger for Gideon puts a totally new construction on some of these lines:
Not exactly brothers And certainly not lovers Just put us down as an old friendship We've been through complications, Complicated situations We ain't even at the end yet ... Man, I'm not saying you're not free I'm just saying That you're so much like me And I'm so much like you The things we used to do And the things that we went through Now we're old enough to laugh At the folly of our youth ...
A couple of other minor things from OftC, while we're here:
It's a "butterfly knife" because "butterfly" stands in contrast to all the stinging/biting insects which are normally used as metaphors for the Skins. Charlemagne is among the Skins pretending to be Gideon, but he's a gangster without a sting.
She gave him a ride to some kid's house in Cleveland He stayed there for two weeks, the cops finally found him
These lines really threw me for a loop for a while. It was pretty early on that I realized that this wasn't Cleveland, Ohio, but someplace in the Twin Cities. The problem is that there's actually a north side neighborhood in Minneapolis called "Cleveland" (Charlemagne touches the corner of it on his way back up to the Quarry at the end of SG). So for a long time I was trying to sort out a post-crucifixion story centered around possible events up there.
But eventually I realized that this is another bit of misdirection on Craig's part. He puts those two lines in right after "the night with the fight" to make you think that Mary gave the boy a ride after the stabbing. But in fact there's no connective wording there --- hearing it, we just assume that we're getting things in chronological/causal order (he plays this trick in a number of other places as well, Multitude of Casualties being a major example). The ride in question is when she first drives him to Gideon's place on Columbus, to hide and to get help. And "Cleveland" is so named for the same reason that "Michigan" is so named --- because Columbus between 28th and Lake is divided into two parts separated by a gap, and Cleveland was the only US President to have two terms of office separated by a gap. (Note, while we're here, the term "stayed"; that's the same word that both Jesse and the Narrator use for Charlemagne's time there, w/ "the place you're staying" [CF] and "while you were still staying there" [Ambassador], respectively.)
From this we know that Charlemagne stayed at Gideon's place for two weeks, and then the cops caught up with him. That part of the story we get from Jesse:
They said they came to the place you're staying You went out the window and since then noone's seen you
In fact, Charlemagne didn't go out the window; he was still in the apartment. But the cops didn't recognize him, and no one saw him after that, because from that point on he looked like Gideon.
At this point every new line opens up about twenty other things that we could easily talk about. But that's more than enough for today, so I'll stop here.
Shit is getting fun now; I hope I'm managing to convey even a fraction of the sheer mad joy of the whole thing. Thank you for reading this far, and if you can take a moment in the middle of it to remember Still Alive Carl, thank you for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 19, 2016 22:31:28 GMT -5
Oh I didn't think you were calling me crazy, like you I was addressing the likely perception that I might be. And definitely, yes, most of these things, Dylanology, Paul is Dead, etc. are all batshit. The question of how we judge the difference is interesting. But most interesting to me is just to focus on Craig's skills and ambitions as a writer, both of which are pretty damn rare. Your quote is better, but I ran into a similar one in the 2014 Exclaim interview ( link): I'm way past 75 listens for some of these songs, and I'm still hearing new things. In your quote he uses the word "puzzle," which is interesting. It is like a puzzle, of course. But the tools for solving it mainly come down to rigorous separation of perception from reality, and understanding the characters as human beings, both of which feel deeper, somehow, than puzzle-solving; I guess that's a word I wouldn't expect the person who built it all to use. But maybe he's indifferent about that as long as people listen. So that St. Peter Upside Down thing looks like something I'm going to have to check out, ha. I can't tell at all what it's about but just like you say, these are very familiar themes. That's awesome. You were right or very close about basically everything you said about Holly the other day, and you're right here about Arms & Hearts and literally almost everything about CSTLN. I think the GLS line is the Narrator talking about Gideon --- we see Gideon wanting the prison tattoos ("scars"), but not the fights to earn them ("war"), in Knuckles --- but I'm less sure about it being a conversation. Let me wrap this up because it's been a week of crazy late nights and I need to sleep, but I'll try to come back to some of this stuff shortly. And keep thinking about it. I mentioned that the Narrator's call for revenge comes up in Hot Soft Light, but forgot to add that their agreement not to seek it after all is described there also: The band played screaming for vengeance And we agreed, this world is mostly manacled As elsewhere [YGD, OWL, CSTLN, A&H, BCrosses] "the band" here means the Narrator. "Screaming for Vengeance" is a Judas Priest song, and "the world is a manacled place" is a lyric from it; the meaning is that the Narrator wanted to go attack the Skins, but they agreed instead that they would restrain themselves ("manacled"), because, as Charlemagne said, vengeance is God's, who exists outside of space and time ("this world"). Apparently Craig had Charlemagne's funny formulation written down somewhere as far back as the BAGIA timeframe, even though he didn't use it until Teeth Dreams came out. (It would be something to get a look at those notebooks.) Back to the theme of choosing non-violence; we can now take on the longest-running double entendre in the whole canon, a crazy ten-line thing in Barely Breathing. At the surface, the Narrator is talking about his experiences going to shows and meeting Ray Cappo back in high school: Summer 88 was all heat and intensity. I saw the Youth of Today at the 7th Street Entry. There were skins in the pit. And some of them tried to kill me. Same club next summer. Now they're called Shelter. After the show I spoke with the singer. And he tried to hand me a pamphlet about Hare Krishna. I said you've got to be kidding. Who the hell is the blue guy? But then he said something special. Using only his eyes. But if we ignore the dates and recall that the Party Pit, the Ambassador, the banks of the river etc. are just different parts of Hell [BCamp, SN, OftC, etc.], we can see a single continuous subtext under the whole thing. Putting aside "88," the first of the three verses above is about the Narrator's experience at the metal bar. Take a look again at the simplified map of the Party Pit, which puts a perfectly coherent but totally different construction on the "7th Street Entry" to the "pit": Following this reading, the "Youth of Today" are the kids, including Gideon; some of the Skins "tried to kill" the Narrator when they beat him up along with Charlemagne. In the next verse, "same club" means "back down to the Ambassador," to Hell, for the crucifixion. The Narrator was ready for a war, but then he spoke to Gideon (of the former "youth"; now called "Shelter" because he's hiding Charlemagne in his Columbus Ave apartment). We know it's Gideon too because of the special eyes ("psycho eyes" [Swish], "wild eyes" [HSL], "enlightened eyes" [BCrosses]). And Gideon told him about a non-violent alternative. It's easy to accept that "Hare Krishna" means non-violence, especially in the context of Barely Breathing, where non-violence is an explicit moral of the song ("No one wins at violent shows" [BBreathing]). And Shelter really was a Krishnacore band. But that's not all that's going on here; "Who the hell is the blue guy?" isn't just the Narrator's 1989 reaction to seeing a picture of Krishna in the pamphlet. No, he's incredulous, because Gideon is telling him about the magic trick he has planned. Which is to put a transparent screen on the fence around the water tower (take another look at the close-up a few posts back) and use the projector to create the *image* of Charlemagne as the target for the stabbing. This magic trick, dating from the 1500's and popularly known as "Pepper's Ghost" ( wikipedia), usually puts a blue tinge on the projected image; you can see this in the following examples from Google Images (the fourth one is from the 2012 Coachella festival, where the technique was used to bring Tupac "back to life" for a performance). So "the blue guy" is Charlemagne's projected image; it's supposed to appear to be Charlemagne himself, but among themselves the characters make references to it as a "spirit" or "ghost" (part of Gideon's status as the Holy Ghost is due to the fact that he's the one projecting it. When, after the crucifixion, Charlemagne says "I guess he might have been that ghost" [A&H], he's referring to Gideon as the animating force behind his own image). The details about what they do with the image are scattered all over the place, and it'll take at least a few days to get it all. But let's take it a piece at a time. First off, the Narrator objects that the idea is nuts, and it is. A normal, skeptical audience wouldn't likely be taken in by it. But we're told in clear terms that this is not a normal, skeptical audience [OftC]: When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing Where townies would gather and drink until blackout Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out That repeated emphasis on "blackout" / "pass out" is deliberate; when they party in the Pit, the Skins get completely fucked up, and Gideon's counting on this to help "sell" their production. It's not just that they will believe it --- it's that, due to some combination of the drugs, drama, murder, and special effects, they will be terrified by what they see. Mary tells Charlemagne that she's foreseen them falling to the ground at the sight of the spirit [ABlues]: We walked into the church and people got down on the floor Rolled around and banged the chairs all filled up with the spirit of the Lord I've never felt like that before And in Records and Tapes, the Narrator recalls that that's how it really happened: Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword Spooked by the spirit of Samuel The fence is mentioned explicitly a few times: in Hostile, Mass., Charlemagne is described In the Back Bay fens getting gentle Up against the fence with some guy who looks like Mickey Mantle where "the Back Bay fens," following the Hostile Massachusetts metaphor, are the wet areas around Phalen creek in the middle of Swede Hollow (the Party Pit); "getting gentle," because the fight is fake; "up against the fence," because it's his image projected on the fence screen that's in the fight; "with some guy who looks like Mickey Mantle" because of the crew cut. And in Sweet Payne, it's the first of the listed hazards in which the kids find themselves: We got tangled in electrical fences Of course, in order to project the image, they have to film it first. That's what's happening in this passage, reported by the Narrator [SS]: Upstairs at some hesher's apartment Underneath some posters of panthers That one guy in camouflage dancing Eyes shut with his arms out like Christ The other guy was licking his knife And then it went white We've mentioned the fact that Gideon always lives upstairs; this is in his apartment on Columbus Ave. His hair's grown out in his years away from the Skins, so he's a hesher now. Charlemagne is being filmed, "camouflaged" like a townie in sweatpants (he has to blend in with the Party Pit crowd until Judas betrays him), dancing at first, then kneeling [ABlues] with his eyes shut and his arms out like Christ, all following Mary's description of her vision. The "other guy licking his knife" is again Gideon, but he's not just doing it to set the scene. More on this tomorrow. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 19, 2016 1:59:04 GMT -5
A lot of our information about what happened while Charlemagne was staying with Gideon comes from The Ambassador.
The POV character of this song is the Narrator (the "you" is Charlemagne). It's the story of how the Narrator comes to find Charlemagne at the apartment on Columbus (his presence there is mentioned in SPayne). The Narrator doesn't trust Gideon at first, and tries to persuade Charlemagne to join him in an attack on the Skins. But Gideon has a different idea, and wins first Charlemagne and then the Narrator himself over to his way of thinking.
While you were in Michigan She was pretty much living in A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club.
It was called The Ambassador She was pretty much crashing there. The space between the skin and all her blood.
The Narrator starts by telling Charlemagne that, while he was staying with Gideon on Columbus ("in Michigan"), Mary was pretty much living/crashing down at the metal bar (which we now find out is called The Ambassador). She's living the same life there as before, doing meth, fucking, and bleeding from her stigmata, making it "the space between the skin and all her blood".
I doubt that this is actual evidence of Mary's situation in the metal bar going from bad to worse; while it sounds like the Narrator is communicating bad news to Charlemagne, that's more likely just setting the scene for the purposes of the song in the usual "elliptical" way. In Ascension Blues Mary has already told Charlemagne that she's sick of the situation, and that he can't know where she lives, with the clear implication that she's "pretty much living" there before this. But I plan to double-check this all again, to make sure I'm not missing some actual new low here, or a different possible order of events.
Skipping the pan-out "nights/days" verse to stay with the Narrator's story to Charlemagne:
A Bay City tire shop. It's just a temporary stop. A touchdown on a trip that was mostly undefined.
Again, the tire shop is on the same "Michigan" block, on the gap between the north and south parts of the street; it's also "Houston," where Gideon "touched down" after the long lost-his-mind trip.
While you were still staying there. All the halls smelled like burning hair. In the end it made you sick but at first you didn't mind.
The halls of the club smelled like burning hair, from the Skins burning the trimmings after shaving their heads. When the Narrator and the others first went to the metal bar years ago, they didn't mind the smell; now it was sickening.
(Again, skipping the "nights/days" verse)
I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys. That were asking around for you just the other night. There was blood on the bed And the lights in their eyes. If you came around the back We could take them by surprise.
The Narrator goes on: I'm pretty sure you'd recognize these guys (the Skins), he tells Charlemagne; they were asking around for you just the other night (as also reported in CF). Mary's blood was on the bed, and they had the light of the "silver splinter" [R&T] of meth in their eyes.
And then, an unexpected turn: he proposes to Charlemagne that they go on the attack. "If you came around the back, we could take them by surprise." We've already noted that Charlemagne is himself contemplating "violent red visions" [CatCT, CF] of the end times. The Narrator appears now as a literal ambassador to him, coming to propose that they undertake a "war" [Knuckles, CatCT] against the Skins together. The echo, in "came around the back," of "Taxmen coming around the back in their kevlar vests" [Knuckles] is deliberate; it's violence that the Narrator has in mind.
Your friend from the tire shop. He keeps talking about some rock Like he wants something hard to hit his head on.
You said he's a mystic. Well I know he's not Catholic. He's got a cross all upside down carved in his arm.
The Narrator looks at Gideon with distrust, still mindful of his role in Mary's growing addiction years before [HM, PP]. He hears him talking about "some rock," and thinks he's still the same guy, saying the same things:
- Gideon, being "soft" [SN, MPADJs, etc.] was preoccupied with being "hard" as a gang member [Knuckles].
- in the liner notes for Banging Camp we see that Gideon's "hi, I like to party on the problem blocks" lyric is a late change; the original text was "He says, Not me baby, / I grew up in the city / let me have the creeps the cops and the rock" [BCamp]. Comparison of the elements of this original text to the same collection of elements (city, insects, cops, meth) in "But if small town cops are like swarms of flies and blackened foil is like boils and hail" [CatCT] confirms that Gideon's "rock" can be understood as the Narrator understands it, namely as a reference to meth. (I just realized that "Rock Problems" contains a pun on the same meaning, specifically to Mary's addiction as detailed in that song; and maybe "Rocky Mountain" High [MM, C&N] does too.)
- he's got a upside-down cross tattooed on his arm, mark of the Profane Existence [SN] and Unholy Ghost [A&H] that he's sometimes seen to be.
But the Narrator has deliberately misunderstood Gideon here, and when he recoils from the tattoo, we see what's going on:
In offering violence to the Skins, the Narrator has stepped into the role of Peter, who tried to defend Christ from crucifixion by drawing his sword against the men who came to arrest him [John 18:10]. His fear of the tattoo recalls the fact that Peter himself was later crucified upside-down. And Gideon is talking about "some rock" because he's heard the Narrator's proposal, and is calling him out as Peter (the name literally means "rock"), of whom Jesus said "upon this rock I will build my church" [Matthew 16:18].
We saw earlier that the "think about his security" line in DLME is a reference to the moment when Peter drew his sword (or rather, to Jesus' response) [Matthew 26:53], and there are others. In Hot Soft Light,
The band played screaming for vengeance
is a direct allusion to the Narrator taking on this role. Similarly, in Curves and Nerves, the second video, corresponding to the crucifixion (in the same way that the first video corresponds to the metal bar beatdown) is called "Revenge of The Pervs" [C&N]. And now we can guess that the line from Both Crosses,
Hey Peter You've been pretty sweet since Easter break
refers to Peter, not as the disciple who denied Jesus three times, but as the one who turned to violence to defend him. We don't know how he's been sweet, yet; but "Peter" there is the Narrator.
(Again, skipping the "nights/days" verse, and the repeat of the Skins verse)
When you came back to us In South Minneapolis You said revenge exists outside of space and time.
It's partly the majesty of the music here, of course, but in the whole story I feel this is the one moment when Charlemagne manages to rise above himself. He gets it mixed, plate-welding "God exists outside of space and time" onto "Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord" [Romans 12:19], but the result still has real grandeur. Violence is rejected; they're going to tackle this another way.
Back behind The Ambassador. Man it feels kind of magical. I guess your friend can really move things with his mind.
It was called The Ambassador There wasn't much diplomatic there. The space between the skin and all the blood.
We know now that "Back behind the Ambassador" refers to the Party Pit, where the fake crucifixion will be staged. We can guess that the "space between the skin and all the blood" in this context refers to the fake stabbing, where there will be blood that doesn't come from Charlemagne's skin. There won't be a lot of talking when it happens (and the Narrator wasn't a particularly diplomatic ambassador in the present instance either).
But the main thing is that Gideon has a magic trick to play, an alternative to violence, that convinced Charlemagne, and then the Narrator, to turn from vengeful thoughts and get back together in a newly Unified Scene ("James King" --- the Creator/musician --- "King James" --- the Savior of the Gospels --- and "James Dean" --- the exile living East of Eden? that last one is tough [SPayne]; "Me and my friends are like / Doublewhiskeycokenoice ... we'll put it back together" [CSummer]).
We get a more detailed account of what Gideon said to the Narrator to change his mind in another song; this was the thing I promised spencer a couple of days ago, but it's late again and it'll be better to start with it tomorrow anyway.
Thanks always for reading, and for taking a moment to remember Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 18, 2016 1:09:20 GMT -5
Wow, thanks, that's a big improvement on my definition. And now that you say it, I think you guys must be right about this: "pinned down" as a play on words with "pinned," is exactly like "stuck around" as a play on words with "stick" (stickpin). I had imagined Craig handing the text over to Franz and being sort of fatalistic about what happened to it after, but I have to agree that an intentional play on words seems a lot more likely. Good call. Muzzle, Pringles is a brand of potato chips or crisps in the US that comes in a can (the chips are regular in shape, and stack neatly in a column). The can is pretty sturdy and can be repurposed for crafts or whatever. Coincidentally --- or maybe this is why the idea seemed natural to me --- I lived in NYC back in the late 90's early 00's, and for a while around 2002 was poaching wifi from a nearby hotel using a Pringles can antenna (I got automatically logged out by their portal every half hour, which was a pain; but the antenna itself worked great). Not the same thing as a projector, let alone a laser projector, which is a pretty tall order, I admit. But special effects and magic tricks are supposed to be Gideon's thing. (Spencer, don't know if you saw the 300 trumpets thing that muzzle was talking about, but "Gideon" is an allusion to Gideon in the Bible, who defeated the army of the Midianites using only visual and sound effects [Judges 7:17-22].) Well, I'm pretty sure I'm not crazy. :-) It's inevitable that I've got some stuff wrong, but there's just zero chance in my mind that things like the Gideon Biblical parallel are coincidental. But that's me, and it's a cool world because people are different. I ran into another interesting thing from Craig yesterday, having to do with your speculation about whether he planned out the story before they cut AKM. A few days ago he did an interview with Sean Cannon on WFPK ( link); near the end he mentions talking to writer Willy Vlautin about his novel Lean on Pete, and being kind of stunned to learn that Vlautin *didn't* have the whole story figured out before he started writing. That says something about Craig's own method, I think. There's a ton of stuff to go over in the story now, let me keep going with Gideon. First, Bay City. Charlemagne went to Gideon's place to get help, and to hide out from the cops and the Skins, who are all suddenly looking for him. In Runner's High, Charlemagne doesn't say who's after him, but in The Ambassador it's specified that the Skins are asking around for him (Charlemagne is the "you" of The Ambassador) while he's staying with his Bay City tire shop friend in Michigan. And in Criminal Fingers we hear from Jesse that both the Skins and the cops have been by the restaurant to look for him. So when Jesse says of the Skins that They said they heard that you've been staying On Columbus between 28th and Lake and of the cops that They said they came to the place you're staying You went out the window and since then noone's seen you we understand that Charlemagne was eventually tracked down "while [he was] still staying there" [Ambassador] in Michigan, that is, on Columbus between 28th and Lake. What's on Columbus between 28th and Lake? Why, bless my soul if it isn't a tire shop: Which is kind of kickass. But what's that thing running east-west through the middle of the block? You can see it better in Google Earth: And here's the view from Street View; on the right is the corner of the tire shop, on the left is the northern half of the block, and between them runs the bridge over a ravine of some kind with a recreation trail running down it. And let's go back to Michigan for a moment. In Sweet Payne, the Narrator says We got so high some nights Michigan looked just like a mitten It turns out that Michigan is commonly said to be shaped like a mitten (see Wikipedia entry: link en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan), and is even called the Mitten state. But if you look at the map there's an obvious problem with this: The Lower Peninsula is effectively shaped like a mitten. But across the gap there's the whole Upper Peninsula too. So on the one hand this is a joke to the effect that all these friendly Midwestern folks saying that it looks like a mitten must be majorly high. But it's also drawing our attention to the fact that Michigan has two halves separated by a gulf. And this block of Columbus has two halves separated by a gulf too. That's why it's Michigan. (The tire shop, being situated on the southern edge of the gap, might be Bay City for this reason also; that's where Bay City is situated on the map of Michigan.) There was more that I wanted to get to today but it's been a nutty week and I'm totally falling asleep. I'll pick it up tomorrow. In any case, thanks for reading and for your thoughts for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 23:41:38 GMT -5
Oh man, keep going. I still have a ways to go until the crucifixion itself, so I really don't want to spoil too much, but in fact you are right about a *lot* of your Holly guesses. Keep turning it over ... Yes!!! I'll flesh it out when we get there, but man, that one is unbelievably satisfying, isn't it? The point I was trying to make about this is that I'm pretty sure *Franz* is the one who chose to stop at "pinned down," not Craig --- in all other songs, Craig set the words to music, but in this song only, Franz was the one who set the words to music, chose what to emphasize, to repeat, etc. I'm pretty sure the words Craig put into his hand just had the verses in basic form, and not the bits and pieces that got cut up and fit to the score as it changes later on. At any rate, that's my inference from the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): But I could be wrong about that! I was saying yesterday that, for a while, I thought Reservoir Woods Park might be part of the story, and maybe even the location of the Party Pit. But on closer inspection, I saw that that circular thing in the SW corner of the picture I posted yesterday isn't a pit, it's a memorial of some kind (there's a cemetery there). So if the Party Pit was located in the park, it had to be hidden by trees or something. I scrolled around Google Maps a bit scanning parkland areas for bowl-shaped depressions, but couldn't find anything. Google searches of "quarry" came up with the shopping center from Southtown Girls, but nothing that was actually a pit, let alone near a park. I met a guy from Minnesota and asked him if he knew the Hold Steady, and fuck yeah he knew the Hold Steady! but he'd never heard of any place that the Party Pit might be based on. But it had to be somewhere, and even if I were to doubt that, Craig had clearly said in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link) that it was a real place: One day I was at work, listening to One for the Cutters, and these lines hit me: Out on the parkways after the parties It was always arousing when they'd rev up their engines Mary used to party with the townies, and then get in their big black cars [BCamp] and cruise around on the parkways. Well, that's a pretty particular detail. There aren't too many parkways where I live, anyway, and if that's true of the Twin Cities too, maybe it could help narrow things down. So I went back to Google Maps for Minneapolis and in the Nearby search bar typed in "parkway." A bunch of big red icons for various businesses came up, and then some little red dots for public transit stops and intersections. There wasn't much of a pattern, but there was a little cluster of spots over in the east part of St. Paul. I zoomed in there, and hey, would you look at that: there's a Johnson Parkway there that starts a little bit east of Lowertown, which leads into Wheelock Parkway, and from there to others around the city. Maybe that's something. So I'm looking around the various green areas here in Earth view, but still not seeing any Party Pit bowls, or rocky ex-quarries, or anything that fit what I was looking for. But that Swede Hollow Park looks kind of interesting, and maybe there's something beneath the tree cover. So on a whim I google it. Third link up is a MinnPost article called "Exploring Swede Hollow, once a neighborhood carved out of the wild" ( link), and I click. The article opens up with the following sketch, and I just about shit myself: So yeah, that's pretty much the Party Pit. It's not a pit in a park; it's a park in a pit. And take a look at the map above again. Swede Hollow is the knot that ties Lowertown, Payne Avenue, Railroad Island / the railroad yards, and the banks of the Mississippi river all together in a unit. Now I'm pretty fucking excited. I drill into the map; there are sketchy places to park on the SW end of it (at the southern terminus of Payne Avenue!), so I make like Mary in OftC and switch into Street View there. And what do you know, someone has set up Street View for the path that winds through the park. Nice ...! I start a virtual trek through the park, through the tunnels under 7th Avenue and up along the northern fork of the path. It's kind of surreal, but I'm definitely walking "into the woods" [OftC] here. The only thing that's a little disappointing as I'm clicking my way forward is the water tower in Reservoir Woods Park in the back of my head; I'm wondering how the hell I'm going to connect that to the story, now that I've found the Party Pit and it's so far away. After another minute or so --- like Mary, I'm thinking --- I see the trees opening up; I'm definitely coming to a clearing, a little overgrown, but there are no trees (there are better pictures than on Street View; search for the "SwedeHenge" sculpture garden and look at pictures of that). And I step out into the intersection next to the clearing space ... and what the hell is that blue thing on the left? Water tower! Towering over the clearing! You can see it from the clearing itself, with less vegetation, in my avatar; that's the old Hamm's brewery in the background, and it's the wikipedia article on the brewery ( link) where I later found the picture. Take a good look at the close-up; at least one of the details is important. With this, Hold Steady Twin Cities geography gets a lot simpler. All these locales at the bottom of Lake Street in St. Paul turn out to be aspects of one big sketchy place. For example, we can see now why the metal bar beatdown, which happened in the basement of the metal bar, is described with "they whaled on him till they killed him down in Penetration Park" [BCamp]. Payne Avenue runs along the northern side of the park; "Penetration Park," the Party Pit, is *literally* "behind the Ambassador" [Ambassador]. Stevie Nix and One for the Cutters identify "the camps down by the banks of the river" with the Party Pit (and it appears that illegal shelters and shantytowns are in fact a big part of Swede Hollow's history). Stevie Nix has: She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River / [liner] paths along the banks and One for the Cutters has both an implicit reference to the paths going through the woods, and an explicit one to her secret: Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing ... It was hard to describe so she kept it a secret The girls that she lived with, they knew nothing about it So now we can understand the story that's being told in Banging Camp: I saw her at the party pit She was shaky but still trying to shake it Half naked and three-quarters wasted She was completely alone I saw him at the riverbank He was breaking bread and giving thanks With crosses made of pipes and planks Leaned up against the nitrous tanks The POV character of Banging Camp is the Narrator: he's in the Party Pit because, once again, he's followed Mary, "half naked" as usual ("wearing see-thru / it was standard issue" [SPotC] etc. [Swish, HM, BCamp, NS, Weekenders]) and three-quarters wasted, hoping to keep an eye on her. Mary, he notes, was completely alone; but he saw Gideon, and Holly, on the nearby riverbank. There are more examples but I'm running out of gas here. Collectively, these St. Paul locales are all referred to in terms meant to suggest Hell at the bottom of the Jacob's Ladder of Lake Street. See Going on a Hike: We were hanging at a rock and roll club It was painted just like hell And Smidge, where "The Whole" is obviously a pun on "The Hole," and "the void," all in opposition to Uptown: At first it felt like heaven. Then it felt just like The Whole. ... At first it felt like faith. Then it felt just like the void. ... Let's go. Let's go back uptown. See also the Party "Pit" itself, and the "Wormhole" of Almost Everything, Lowertown (the literal Inferno!) opposite of Uptown, etc. So we've found the scene of the crime. Now we just have to clear up what actually happens there. I know I promised more than this, both in general and about Gideon, but I'm totally burned out tonight and need to keep it short (so to speak). More tomorrow, maybe even more than one post tomorrow if I can hack it. Thank you very much for your patient reading, and please remember Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 9:31:09 GMT -5
Hey spencer, thanks. This is going to be easier to read if I just answer direct without waiting for the next episode, so let me do it that way. There are two answers to the question, the quibble-quibble answer and the real answer. The quibble-quibble answer is a bunch of quibbles. The reason why Mary sent Charlemagne to Gideon for help is because he's a magician; they are going to stage the performance of their lives and need his skills. Gideon is the one who had the idea (we are actually told this in yet another passage, coming later today) for the projector, and for the details of the production generally. He knew how to build the device he wanted to build --- magic is his thing --- and built it with suitable available materials; a Pringles can is perfect for the lens tube so he used that. He wasn't following a step-by-step thing on the internet. I meant that "you, the reader, can google to see that a Pringles-can projector is feasible." It certainly was feasible in 2004, and Craig had spent enough years around stages and rock show effects to know that. But the real answer is that Craig, "always thinking of what I can fit in," doesn't waste space on arbitrary detail. I totally understand that not everyone is going to be on board with that. It's something that you have to entertain seriously as an axiom, see where it leads, and then evaluate the results based on your own sense of probability and dramatic satisfaction. But the pipe gets repeated emphasis for a reason. And Craig's use of "pipe" in a technically accurate but using-the-obvious-interpretation-to-mislead you way is the same thing he does with "shawl" and "bandages" and "Walter" and a million other things, that is a focus of his art. There's still more about the Pringles can to come but, really, that last answer is the main thing. You're still reading, so you're giving me a chance to bring it all together in a totality that either can or can't possibly be a coincidence. I'm happy with that. Edit: just to be sure that the doubt isn't about something even more basic, I mean that he made a literal pipe out of the Pringles can by cutting off the bottom; see the first definition of "pipe" in the American Heritage Dictionary ( link):
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 16, 2016 0:31:56 GMT -5
Holy shit man, that thing from Lifter Puller vs. The End of The Evening is even tighter than I Like the Lights --- you recognize the cough and Pontius Pilate I'm sure, but there's a lot more there that I haven't even tied up yet. OK, I promise to come back to this, I'll be able to do it pretty soon. Is that Jenny speaking those lines? About your guesses: you're right that we're not done with Holly, but I can't spoil the why and how yet. Charlemagne is the POV character in Citrus, that's right. And your instinct about the blurry lines is heading the right way. Let me dig in and you'll get some satisfaction on this. All right. Obviously, I didn't work through the story from beginning to end; I learned a little bit about characters and events here and there as I made one connection or discovery after another. And the road by which I came to Mary's plan (which I didn't even know was hers, at the time) is something I want to record as it happened. We talked a while back about the key lines from The Weekenders I remember the metal bar. I remember the reservoir. You could say our paths have crossed before. in which Charlemagne recalls Mary foreseeing his beating and crucifixion. That the beating happened at the metal bar is abundantly clear at this point. But the idea that the reservoir was related to the crucifixion was just an inference from symmetry. Under the circumstances, the obvious thing to do was to look for the reservoir. So I went to Minneapolis, MN on Google Maps and typed in "reservoir" in the search bar. Two suggestions came up: Reservoir Boulevard Minneapolis, MN Reservoir Woods Park Dale Street North, Roseville, MN That first one, Reservoir Boulevard, is a street in NE Minneapolis that runs northward to an actual reservoir: But the reservoir itself is located in Columbia Heights, and I couldn't see anything to tie it to the THS story. The second one, Reservoir Woods Park, is a hell of a lot more interesting: Where I come from, a "reservoir" is a natural or artificial lake like the one in the first photo. But that thing in Reservoir Woods Park isn't a lake. That's a water tower. So, apparently, the "reservoir" that Charlemagne's remembering could be a lake; or it could be a water tower. There's more --- Reservoir Woods Park is only about a mile east of the HarMar mall in Roseville, which "HarMar?," a liner notes alternative lyric to "We met him at some suburban St. Paul mall" [CSTLN], identifies as part of the story. And if you follow Larpenteur Avenue a few miles west past the mall to Minneapolis, it turns into Hennepin Avenue (passing just south of the Quarry mall) and crosses the Grain Belt Bridge, as foretold in Party Pit. So yeah, I was pretty psyched at this point. And then I was looking at that aerial view of the park and saw that round thing that looks like a pit in the southwest corner of the picture. And I thought, that's got to be the Party Pit. Sure, the Quarry mall was a few miles west, but if there was one quarry there, there could certainly have been others in the area; I imagined Mary in One for the Cutters, parking by one of them, walking through the woods until she came to the clearing, where townies surrounded the pit, partying, with the water tower looming above the trees beyond. It took me a while to figure out that this was almost all wrong. But there was one part that was right: namely, that "reservoir" can mean "water tower." So it didn't matter that I had a picture of Reservoir Woods Park in my head when I was listening to these lines from Ascension Blues: He came onto the court; and he knelt before the sword There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board I'm pretty sure I went there once before I knew these lines were about Mary's vision of Charlemagne's crucifixion; even if I hadn't really noticed "I'm pretty sure I went there once before" [ABlues] versus "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders], the relation of "he knelt before the sword" [ABlues] to "She saw the angel put a sword in his side" [BCrosses] was perfectly clear. But "the soundman fried the board" ...? And then it hit me, with a whole lot of moving pieces at once. Looking at Hostile, Mass., we already made a note that Gideon was Reaching out to try to touch the special effects Along the same lines, in Sweet Payne the Narrator says that "we" (including Charlemagne, as it turns out), visited Gideon in Bay City (the same point in the story we're at now), where We got so high some nights Michigan looked just like a mitten Some nights we got fried Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows Reach into the speaker and try to hold on to the quarter notes Which sounds an awful lot like what we're told about the crucifixion ("sharpest knife") in Navy Sheets: Everybody's reaching for the sharpest knife Legs wide open on the opening night Everybody's bathing in the laser lights Clever kids screwing with some new device And finally there's Constructive Summer: We're gonna lean this ladder Up against the water tower Climb up to the top and drink and talk ... We are our only saviors We're gonna build something this summer And I thought, holy shit: the soundman is Gideon; our clever kids are climbing the water tower to place some kind of special-effects "new device" up there, for a laser show "opening night." To be their own saviors, somehow ... and then the "opening night" stuff made Slapped Actress flash across the picture: fake fights making it look real we make our own movies and I knew that that was it. *The plan is to act out Mary's vision themselves, and to fake Charlemagne's death.* We know the story; One for the Cutters tells us how it went down, in the woods at the Party Pit, among the partying Skins. Mary brought Charlemagne to Gideon because they need his help to pull off a holographic special-effects magic trick (he's a magician, remember) as part of the production. (Google can point you to various DIY projects for making a laser projector with a Pringles can lens tube.) So, muzzle, for once I get to answer your question: Like so many of these goddamn lines, it means just what it says: Charlemagne didn't feel any pain. Because the stabbing was fake. But telling the story of his death afterward ended up having a few more complications attached than he'd anticipated. Which you can now look forward to. :-) Also: bonus points if you can tell me the name of the Biblical figure who, at the head of a small band, defeated a hostile army with nothing but sound effects and visuals. You were right about another thing ... I've got a lot of favorite Hold Steady songs, but Constructive Summer has a kind of special place at the head of the list. There was a month or so there in which I had already understood that Charlemagne's crucifixion was faked, but hadn't yet figured out the stranger stuff that happens along with it. And I had gone into this thing looking for the story of a miracle, so I was a little disappointed thinking that I'd ended up back among the clever kids. But then I remembered that exuberance of climbing to the top to drink and talk, and the reminder that we can all be something bigger. That shit is standalone awesome, regardless of anything else, and it's stuck with me. We are our only saviors. I believe that. All right. More about the plan and the crucifixion and Bay City and all that shit tomorrow. And geography. Thanks for reading, and for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 14, 2016 19:17:43 GMT -5
Yes yes yes ... the first big aha about this came when I was looking at Ascension Blues, then I remembered Slapped Actress and in that moment knew it was right. I think you're entirely right about your reading of the song, too --- the reason Craig is telling the story in the way he's telling it, is because this way of framing things is pertinent to life as he's seeing it. I don't want to speculate too much about where he's at exactly, but these are things he cares about. There's just a ton of stuff in the songs about acting and anxiety, or about acting becoming real, both for good and ill. In a way it's orthogonal to the story, but it keeps seeping back in, both in ways that are completely essential to the plot (like Slapped Actress) and in ways that are almost incidental, like in the Smidge, where Charlemagne starts by remembering (about Jesse) "we used to pretend that we'd never met," and then shit, that pretense becomes almost real. (The Smidge is another amazing song ...) I'm amazed at that Jenny passage you quoted. To my mind that is so clearly built on the same frame as the Mary in the metal bar story, that I would have used it as evidence if I had known about it. "Craig's got this motif or whatever in his head, about a girl who stays out till dawn and gets high and gets fucked in a kind of dangerous way, and determines that she likes it; we see that clearly with Jenny in I Like The Lights, and we're seeing it again with Mary in Sweet Payne etc." And now that you've shown me this, I think it's clear that "I like the lights" in OWL is foreshadowing of how badly the Narrator's hopes will be dashed. So I think I'm going to ease off this idea of the "not part of the story" classification. Spectres doesn't tell us anything new about the story, but it does shine a lot of light on different things in the story, including, again, acting and anxiety, and roles becoming real. There are definitely references to the characters, too ("bleeding through the bandages" is an obvious one; there are a couple of really good ones). Actually, Teenage Liberation is another song that doesn't tell us anything new about the story, even though all the events referred to in it are straight out of the story, and it sounds like it comes from the Narrator. Maybe I should change the classification to "remote commentary" songs or something like that, and then add Teenage Liberation to the list to make it 9. You've given me a lot to think about here. Anyway, I'm just a couple of days away from the thing I didn't want to spoil, and then I'll put the full list out there. That should make it easier to talk about. In the meantime, seriously, thanks for this, this is awesome. Moving on with the story: after Ascension Blues, the next we see of Charlemagne is in Runner's High. We've already said that Runner's High is told from the POV of Gideon, when he's finally "touched down" in "Houston" after years (nearly eight, July 1996 to March 2004, since he was jumped in at the metal bar) of being out of his mind. The song opens with Charlemagne showing up at his doorstep: He stopped by and I didn't even recognize. He looked shaky and sweaty and puffy and petrified. He said that thing in California is kind of compromised. I was hoping you'd help me. Man, I'm so sick of running. We understand that the "thing in California" is Charlemagne's drug dealing (which he's been doing from behind the bar at the St. Paul restaurant where he works with Jesse). We also understand why Gideon doesn't recognize him at first: after drowning Holly in the spring of 1997, he disappeared, going off to the tire shop. They haven't seen each other since then. But there are several other lines in this song that aren't so clear, lines which suggest that a lot has happened between the time that Mary and Charlemagne met at the Uptown church [ABlues] and now. Four things in particular need to be accounted for: The doctors said that it was all in his head. Then they discovered the blood. This is written in a way to suggest the discovery of a gruesome crime --- except that it's not "detectives," it's "doctors," who can only discover something that's been brought to them. With what we know, we can guess what this must refer to: for some reason, Charlemagne went with Mary to seek medical attention for her condition, and the doctors thought he was nuts --- until they saw the stigmata for themselves. What exactly they sought, and why, is not yet clear. But even with what we know now, there can hardly be another explanation. Tried to duck out but we still got stuck. Like a sneaker in the Mississippi mud. The fact that this comes in the middle of a list of things that Charlemagne is explaining to Gideon makes it clear the "we" part is quoted --- Charlemagne is telling him that he and Mary (1) tried to fly, but (2) got stuck. In (3) the Mississippi mud no less. Whatever else this is, it's clearly an allusion to Stuck Between Stations: There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly But he didn't, so he died John Berryman leapt from the Washington Street bridge and died in the mud on the west bank of the Mississippi river ( wikipedia). The use of "duck" seems to be an intentional pun on the name of the bird, to give a second confirmation that Charlemagne's "running" is "flight." And "stuck" is all over SBS. What's the meaning of "stuck" in Stuck Between Stations, then? As we know, the song opens with the famous Sal Paradise quote, which Craig summarized in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): Craig's careful to add the bit about sex versus souls, and it's hard not to be reminded of what we just said a few posts back, that Charlemagne is stuck between loving Jesse with his body and loving Mary with his soul. Looking at that first verse of SBS again, There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together Sucking off each other at the demonstrations, making sure their makeup's straight Crushing one another with colossal expectations, dependent, undisciplined, sleeping late there's a lot of Magazines here: - "There are nights ... sad time together" reminds us that Jesse "isn't always funny in the night" and that "then you'll probably fight" [Magazines]. - "Sucking off each other / making sure their makeup's straight" is, as we've noted, related to Jesse's "Second dates and lipstick tissues" [Magazines]. - We don't know what the "demonstrations" are but they probably belong in the rhyming list of "celebrations" and "dedications" where Jesse "gets pretty wasted" [Magazines]. - Of all the couples in the story, Jesse and Charlemagne are the ones "crushing one another with colossal expectations," namely the pressures of their respective father/Holly complexes ("daddy issues" / "I hope you'll still let me kiss you" [Magazines]). For the rest, they're co-dependent; "undisciplined" is too vague to be linked to anything in particular, but it obviously fits; and Jesse sleeps late in 40 Bucks. So yes: he's stuck, on the one hand, because of Jesse. He and Mary might otherwise be ready to run, but Charlemagne won't leave and abandon her to the harbor bars. Back to Runner's High for the third obscure passage: Speeding through your story of guns and guts and glory. I'm hoping what you're saying is true. Charlemagne's been asking Gideon for help and telling him a tale of problems; why would Gideon respond to bad news by saying "I'm hoping what you're saying is true"? What could Charlemagne be telling him that is at once both hopeful and difficult to believe? Again, knowing what we know about Mary, we can guess: he's told Gideon about her vision, and about the plan that she's hatched around it. Someone must have said something. This is odd. In none of the Hennepin-era songs up to this point has Charlemagne shown anxiety about anything at all except Jesse; but now he's suddenly on the run. The way this line is worded, we'd be likely to think that Holly, instead of wiping her nose and winking, had finally betrayed him, only we know she isn't in the picture now. We remember that in Criminal Fingers, both the cops and the Skins ("your Uptown friends" [CF]) are looking for Charlemagne, so he really is being hunted. Someone must have said something. But who? It's probably an easy guess, given all the pieces of the picture already out there, but it'll be better to talk about this in a couple of days. First we really want to get the exact plan in front of us. And that's one thing I want to describe as I found it, which means I need to finish up the geography along with it. Hope this doesn't feel dragged out --- I'm going there in as straight a line as I can, now. Thank you for continuing to read along, and if there was something that made you say "yeah" here, and you can put just a little of that back out there for Still Alive Carl, I would be very very grateful.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 14, 2016 3:33:00 GMT -5
You're a good guesser, and yeah we are close to some of these things in the story. If you're hooked, keep thinking about them; I promise, the more you bat them around in your head, the louder you're going to laugh when the ahas hit you, and there's a whole chain of them coming up. While working out the story I sometimes wondered whether having more songs made figuring it all out easier, or harder. On the one hand, I don't think there's a chance in hell I could have put it together from just the material of the first three albums. On the other hand, every helping of new songs comes with new false leads, and a lot more text that has to be clearly accounted for. My gut instinct is to say that the tipping point was Heaven is Whenever; I know that my own aha-road came back again and again through a few key songs from that era. Weekenders and Our Whole Lives seem very important in retrospect, and I don't think any song was bigger than Ascension Blues. Ascension Blues is where things pick up after Mary's decision in Records & Tapes. When morning comes, she calls up Charlemagne, and tells him she wants to come up (again, all the way up Lake Street, from Payne Avenue in St. Paul to Uptown in Minneapolis) to meet him: She said she's sick of all the sucking up She said I'm terrified of coming down She wants to meet me back uptown She tells him she's sick of how she's living, of the abandoned sex and the meth addiction; she wants to end it, but she's terrified of coming down. This is something he wants to hear, of course, and it may even be true (the Skins were never more than a substitute for Charlemagne; in R&T we see her contemplating her "morbid mistakes," and it ends with the "silver splinter" of meth "losing ground" [R&T]). So he agrees to meet her somewhere near the place on Hennepin. Diane Lane kept me sane through the spring I was flirting with her films I was trying to say something that seemed kind of interesting Still trying to figure out if she felt anything We already mentioned that Diane Lane's films are the screen adaptations of S.E. Hinton's Outsiders and Rumble Fish. At the time, I forgot to note that, in 2015, Craig responded to the question "Favorite fictional hero in books?" ( link) with three answers: Sal Paradise, Hal Incandenza and Diane Lane played Cherry in The Outsiders, the rich girl who offered to support Johnny (one of the townie Greasers) in court after he accidentally stabbed and killed her boyfriend Bob; the parallel to OftC is evident, and we understand that Charlemagne's talking about princess Mary, whose films are her visions. I believe "through the spring" means through the spring of 2004. (I haven't sat down and done the timeline for this part yet --- when I first started writing these posts I thought I'd catch up these little details along the way, but I've been doing a hell of a lot more writing than thinking since then. And now the story starts to get crazy and the things I haven't nailed down are going to be a pain. But here we are. Please bear with me if I bobble some of these things along the way, once again I'll put together a clean timeline at the end and correct as needed.) This verse covers up a crucial part of the episode that Charlemagne is recounting --- namely, the point at which Mary arrives and explains why she wanted to meet him. From this and the verses that follow, we can infer that she now, for the first time, tells him that he's the object of her visions, and that she's foreseen his crucifixion; then she leads him to a church and says that she wants to show him something. But rather than getting this explanation, we hear Charlemagne pan out to the rest of the spring (it is now March): he tells us that she kept him sane through the insanities which are fast approaching, and that he tried to live up to the role she's cast him in, even while still struggling to understand "how am I supposed to know if you're high, if you won't let me touch you?" [CA]. We walked into the church and people got down on the floor Rolled around and banged the chairs all filled up with the spirit of the Lord I've never felt like that before Mary wants to let him understand what she sees, so she takes him into a Pentecostal "dirty storefront church" [YLHF] to feel the holiness of the people "Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword / Spooked by the spirit of Samuel" [R&T], while she tells him about seeing him as Christ. We said yesterday that there would be more evidence of the two versions of the story, the Crucifixion and the Wedding at Cana, being mixed together; this rolling on the floor is another piece, as is the "sword" (below). I only bow down to the jetset They move so quick we haven't met yet We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven Charlemagne, still thinking of himself as a big-time Savior dealer, is pleased to learn that he's Jesus in this sense too. He's not one of the people falling humbly to the ground around him; he's the kind that only bows down to the jetset, even if that hasn't happened in practice so far. As for them, he'll be friends with them all in heaven, on his ascension as Christ. She said he looked like Jimmy Connors She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein She said we had a pretty huge time He came onto the court and he knelt before the sword There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board I'm pretty sure I went there once before We covered this already: she tells him how she saw him in her vision at prom, how he appeared (and continues to appear) dressed in sweatpants, like a townie, and how she went down on him. He came on to the basketball court in the gym, kneeling to go down on her / kneeling before the knife of the crucifixion --- and then there was an explosion of feedback and electricity in her "speakers" (see "blowing out the speakers on your stereo" [OWL]). What that explosion is, isn't clear yet, but it's clearly related to the scene described in Saddle Shoes: "Eyes shut with his arms out like Christ / The other guy was licking his knife / And then it went white" [SS]. It came to me on television Richard Gere in Days of Heaven Walking through Sam Shepard's mansion We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven She said that he came to her "on television," that is, in her vision, like Richard Gere in Days of Heaven (Richard Gere plays a poor fugitive who, with his girlfriend, schemes to take possession of the mansion of a wealthy landowner, played by Sam Shepard), when she was down at the Ambassador ("Shepard's" mansion). (It seems by the way that the idea for the Shepard character dates at least this far back, prior to his Teeth Dreams appearances. The name may have been suggested by the other Outsiders material in this song.) She said I know you've got a lot of love to give But now you know you can't know where I live I know you're trying to keep it pretty positive And if it makes you feel a little bit better We're gonna all be friends in heaven "But now you know you can't know where I live": finally, along with telling him about the vision of him as Christ, she's told him why he can't touch her. But as a consolation, they're going to be friends in heaven. Charlemagne had used the phrase eagerly, in anticipation of taking his rightful place among the jetset; but coming from Mary, the words are different, and very bitter. It's no consolation to her at all. She wants him, and she's never going to have him. There's a reason why Craig doesn't let on yet why she won't let him touch her, and I won't either; but soon. All the people on my TV We're gonna all be friends in heaven All the actors and the athletes We're gonna all be friends in heaven To be young wild and pretty We're gonna all be friends in heaven In the sweet part of the city We're gonna all be friends in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna get something in heaven We're gonna all be friends in heaven The ending of the song is tremendous: Mary is bitter and she is jealous. Under her breath, the truth comes out; it may be true that she's sick of sucking up, but it's mostly Jesse she's thinking of, "young, wild and pretty / In the sweet part of the city" (she's young, she's "wild" [WaW], and she's "beautiful" [HJ]; she's with Charlemagne all the time when Mary's around, as seen in The Sweet Part of the City). And then we get "We're gonna all be friends in heaven" in a third sense; she's saying to Jesse, "you and I'll be friends in heaven, but not now; and that thing you're looking to get, that we're both looking for? You're not going to get it on this earth." The use of the expression "get something" is unusual here, and Craig uses it of Jesse elsewhere, in the 2014 Spin interview ( link): We have a pretty good idea by now about the imagined love that Jesse thinks is going to fill "this void." Mary's determined to make sure that that doesn't happen. Thanks for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 13, 2016 2:13:27 GMT -5
Agh, of course, you're right! Sorry, I was thinking more about the calendar than the actual words being used, but clearly what you say makes sense. I haven't updated the timeline yet but I will include this too. I have to say that, not being able to imagine the rhythm, the Lifter Puller lyrics I've seen seem pretty insane. I mean that in a thoroughly positive way :-) So I have been thinking about "Craig giving a wink to people paying attention"; there is certainly stuff in the non-story THS songs that at least meets that standard, and probably more. Like this line in Two-Handed Handshake: I know some kids who didn't come back From the plywood painted black which is definitely a reference to the metal bar, as described in Going on a Hike: We were hanging at a rock and roll club It was painted just like hell The bar was plywood painted black They have skull mugs up on the shelves They throw such killer parties But some nights you don't feel so well But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself I've said for example that Holly was drowned on the banks of the river in St. Paul, just below where Payne Avenue ends, so "some kids who didn't come back" from there could be said to fit the story. (Forget about the fact that this seems like a stretch; I'm not done with the geography or the story yet, and it'll look better before we're done.) The thing is that we don't learn anything new here. At most, especially in context ("it's such a gossipy office"?), it seems like a remote reference to the story. But since we've been talking about this, I spent today listening to the non-story B-sides, and you've convinced me that I should go over them a bit after I've finished with the story, just to make a note of these "remote references." Some of them are frankly really good (Spectres has some impressive ones), even if they don't give us any new information about the story per se. I actually found the List of Songs that Craig Finn Has Sung On link after I posted last night, and that took me to the Don't Call Them Twinkies lyrics; I was looking for something about playing dead for the Yankees :-) but no dice, and I'm going to say it's unrelated, like Take Me Out To the Ballgame. Just Saying, which I found on youtube, is more interesting. By the "new information" standard it definitely seems unrelated to the story. But it's not hard to see solid "remote references" in the lyrics, either. So I'll give it a once-over when I'm done with the story. And with that, back to the story. We've talked about how Mary's living in the Act III timeframe; like Charlemagne, she's stuck in a holding pattern and unhappy. Like him, she sees that that pattern can't last. He's under pressure because Jesse's going to crash into the harbor come summer. She's under pressure because he's going to be crucified soon. Someone has to do something, and it's pretty clear that it's not going to be Charlemagne. Records and Tapes tells the story of Mary's decision to do something herself, with hints at the actual idea she comes up with. We never get an upfront description of her plan; we have to put it together from bits and pieces and consequences after the fact. But the hints begin here. The song is sung from the POV of the Narrator, about Mary; he's the one who knows the earliest history of Mary's visions, who's watching Mary struggle with the "silver splinter" of meth, and who remembers the song "Self Destruction." She appeared as a wraith in the drapes Still life with cigarettes, morbid mistakes Trying to suppress a small case of the shakes Some nights St. Paul seems so holy Mary stands at the draped window of the upstairs room at the Ambassador club (the metal bar) in St. Paul [SPayne, Ambassador], smoking, reflecting on her life: it was a morbid series of mistakes by which she got here, and she's badly addicted now; but even in the middle of this, as she looks out on the city, she experiences again the sense of holiness that she feels some nights in St. Paul. (This is not the first such night; there's a long series of them going back to the night of the metal bar beatdown.) Fell in love with the records and tapes Staying out late, summer '88 She disappeared with some kid in the cape He's the one that always gets her the highest We were nervous and restless, but not really bored We brushed our teeth, but it gushed from our pores Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword Spooked by the spirit of Samuel Mary fell in love with the "records and tapes" of her visions (again, not actual music) in the summer of 1988 (dating from her first high & first vision by the banks of the river at 17 [SN]). The rest of the verse alludes to future events, and we have to come back to it when we know more, but some notes are worth making even now: - "She disappeared with some kid in the cape / He's the one that always gets her the highest": this looks superficially like a description of Holly disappearing from her party with Gideon in his magician costume, but that "always" is a tipoff that something's different here. In fact, these lines are a trap, set by Craig to throw us off the main track. "She" is still Mary; we'll come back to the rest soon enough. - "We were nervous and restless, but not really bored / We brushed our teeth, but it gushed from our pores": the Narrator is describing a specific situation to come, which we'll get to shortly. The first time I heard this song I thought that "We brushed our teeth, but it gushed from our pores" was a runaway winner for the worst Hold Steady line ever; but in fact it's a nice little puzzle, and entirely self-contained. That is, there's only one interpretation that can make sense of the sentence, and once that clicks then it's clear what point in the story the Narrator is referring to. - "Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword / Spooked by the spirit of Samuel": the meaning here is still obscure, but the reference isn't: he's telescoping two moments at the end of Saul's life into one --- falling to the ground in terror at the words of the spirit of Samuel [1 Samuel 28:20], and falling on his sword shortly thereafter [1 Samuel 31:4]. Everybody cried when they first saw the bride Right song at the right time The banquet seething with emotions and wine Same program on both sides The beat goes on in the swish and the glide Right song at the right time Over and over 'til the tape deck dies Over and over 'til the tape deck died There are several images laid on top of one another here, but we can sort them out. First, the "tape deck" with the songs refers to her visionary faculty (consistent with the overarching records & tapes metaphor). It's described as an old-school deck with auto-reverse, playing "both sides" one after another, "over and over," with the "same program" on both. This is consistent with everything we know about Mary: she's seeing her visions of Charlemagne-Christ over and over, and mostly (as earlier on this same night) fucking while watching them; from The Swish we understood that "swish" is a blowjob (rinse your mouth out), and the meaning of "glide" is clear by extension. The beat goes on. It's going to go on, too, until the tape deck dies ... and then, from his position outside of time, the Narrator informs us that it did die. The foreshadowing here is pretty obvious; it's made explicit in the next pass through the chorus. At the same time, there's a suggestion that something special happens when the "right song at the right time" is played, which by definition would seem to be something good. (More on this in a moment.) Finally, we get some interesting and surprising detail about the vision she's seeing itself. "Everybody cried when they first saw the bride" means a wedding; "The banquet seething with emotions and wine" must be the wedding banquet. In the context of her vision of Charlemagne-Christ, this can only mean one thing: what she's seeing is now not the crucifixion, but the Wedding at Cana [John 2:1-11], where Mary and Christ were guests, and Christ turned water into wine for his first miracle. (This is apparently also referred to when Jesus-Charlemagne is quoted as saying "Bless ... the water" [SM].) The wikipedia article on the Wedding at Cana ( link) makes note of a tradition and with that, we're back on familiar ground; the visionary sexual encounter that she describes having had with Charlemagne-Christ [ABlues] is here overlaid with the image of their visionary wedding. She's aroused by her visions for a reason. She also drinks wine for a reason, and now we know why: it's a token and a reminder of the wedding itself. (Like margaritas, "wine" in the songs is always and exclusively associated with Mary: she's drinking wine at Holly's party [MM], and at prom [YGD, MN]; they have to get more wine when she shows up in TSPotC; she's drinking fortified wine in LID; Jesse remembers her drinking margaritas and wine in Spinners, see "salted rims", "tavern wine"; and then there are these passages in R&T.) Saw the sun through a crack in the curtains She came up crooked all high and uncertain Every single story has a few different versions You tell the one that makes you look better You tell the one that makes you feel better Back to the present, upstairs in the Ambassador: Mary "saw the sun through a crack in the curtains," a "Cheyenne Sunrise" like the one after the metal bar beatdown so long ago (the sunrise predicted in CSunrise, and recounted by her later in "I stayed up till dawn at some raunchy magazine launch / Hit the open bar and got myself all turned on" [212M]). Returning (in the present) to the image of the looping tape deck, with the same program on both sides, she thinks: all of these stories, these visions, come in different versions. We've already seen that the visionary sexual encounter with Christ described in Ascension Blues was mixed with the vision of the crucifixion ("he knelt before the sword" [ABlues]), and more evidence of mixing will appear as we go further. Maybe it's up to her to choose a version, to choose between the Crucifixion and the Wedding at Cana. With that, we remember the words of the Narrator at the MPADJs party: take off your beret, he said; stop being a DJ, stop spinning your records, and make your own music. And that's what she's going to do. It goes on in an infinite loop Panic in private, disputable truth They killed some dude for his basketball shoes Remember that song "Self Destruction"? The sequence of visions goes on in an infinite loop, and privately, she's in a panic about it: she knows they're true, but maybe the truth they're showing isn't certain. The Narrator remembers "Self Destruction" from the Stop the Violence Movement, a song which urged kids to stop killing each other for stupid reasons and stand together, a song that might have saved the life of a kid like him ("they took ten bucks and my tennis shoes" [YGD]). Maybe the right song at the right time could save a life; maybe a deliberate telling could affect the outcome? Everybody cried when they first saw the bride Right song at the right time The banquet pierced [??] with [??] emotions and wine Same program on both sides I could see the silver splinter in your eyes Losing ground in a landslide Over and over until somebody dies Over and over, then two kids died The chorus (except for the "banquet" line, which is unintelligible here --- suggestions?) repeats, but now "right song at the right time" has a new meaning: could making the song herself, the right vision at the right time, not just bring hope, but affect reality? Seizing on this thought, Mary's spirits are renewed; from that moment, the Narrator could see the "silver splinter" of meth dependency in her eyes losing ground to faith in the future. Even so, the foreshadowing comes back, stronger now; this time it's not the "tape deck" that dies, but "somebody," and in the event, the Narrator tells us, "two kids died." The final verse describes the Skins dealing at Lyndale and Lake, and Gideon, "always awake," performing a magic trick. But it's Mary we want to focus on now. Exactly what she means to do is still not clearly formulated. But it's clear, by comparison with the account of MPADJs, that she's going to make music now; she's going to choose the version she wants, and do the telling herself. Over the next few days we'll find out exactly what that means. I'm sorry this one turned out so long. Thanks for reading this far, and if you can form a quick prayer for Still Alive Carl, thank you very much for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 12, 2016 0:55:12 GMT -5
Haha, shit, this is good. I think I can catch up in one shot here: Now that you say it, I think this has to be the right answer, and no I hadn't figured it out yet. To be honest it wasn't until I sat down and did the Act II timeline (after the "moving pictures" discussion) that I really got a clear idea about the progression of Holly's drug addiction early on. Like you say, they had to get the money for that first, virginal-in-the-theaters summer (both for drugs, and just to live on) from somewhere, and the whole point is that things only started going bad when Charlemagne decided to strike out as a businessman. Excellent catch. I'm adding this to the timeline. I don't know if Mary gets money from her rich father with the lawyers [OftC], or from the horses, or both. I had always imagined the horses as something she came up with just to reel in Charlemagne, but in fact it could be either. This is spoiler stuff, it has to wait. When I first heard HM I thought it was about Charlemagne meeting Holly at a party, and that Hard Corey was some "clever kid" talking who just gave Charlemagne his opportunity to say to Holly "let's get out of here." But that's all wrong, in fact it comes from near the end of the story. Let me not say more than that just yet. I think I'm only a few days from getting to this in the story, but let me answer your question this way. Just like the saddle shop of SS refers to the real Schatzlein Saddle Shop in Minneapolis, the "tire shop" of SPayne and Ambassador refers to a real tire shop in the Twin Cities. It's not a Michelin now, and maybe it never was, but it exists. So the tire shop is a real place, but the city/state names with which it's identified are metaphors. It's called Michigan because of a feature of the block on which it's located (there's a hint about this, and a really funny one, in Sweet Payne). It's called Houston because that's where Gideon was when "touchdown" brought him back to Earth (you know that Houston is where Ground Control for American space missions is traditionally located, right? Don't mean to assume too much of an international audience ...). And Bay City is a Bay City Rollers=Tires joke, or an auto bay joke, or it even works as part of the Michigan geography joke (or, because it's Craig, maybe it's all three). It even gets a third city name later, but we'll get there. You are blowing my mind with Roman Guitars referencing Lifter Puller, and yeah I see the Michigan thing. Just reading that I have no idea if there's a story going on there, or whether it's related if there is; but yeah. Clearly this is something I'm going to have to look at. I mean, under the circumstances I am going to be happy to drag out my THS listening as long as it takes. But I'm hoping for a positive outcome. So the only reason I didn't give the whole list is because one of the very biggest aha moments I had was the realization that one of the songs that most clearly seemed to be outside the story is actually central to it (if I specify what's not included, then of course you'll know what is included also). It might be my favorite Hold Steady track so I'm probably biased toward seeing this as a big revelation. But here's a compromise. Like you, it seems to me that Chillout Tent and Two Handed Handshake are outside the story; those are two more of the eight. And let me give a list of the 86 total that I'm counting:
Almost Killed Me | Separation Sunday | Boys And Girls In America | Positive Jam The Swish Barfruit Blues Most People Are DJs Certain Songs Knuckles Hostile, Mass. Sketchy Metal Sweet Payne Killer Parties | Hornets! Hornets! Cattle And The Creeping Things Your Little Hoodrat Friend Banging Camp Charlemagne In Sweatpants Stevie Nix Multitude Of Casualties Don't Let Me Explode Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night Crucifixion Cruise How A Resurrection Really Feels | Stuck Between Stations Chips Ahoy! Hot Soft Light Same Kooks First Night Party Pit You Can Make Him Like You Massive Nights Citrus Chillout Tent Southtown Girls | Milkcrate Mosh Hot Fries Curves & Nerves Modesto Is Not That Sweet You Gotta Dance | 212 Margarita | For Boston Girls Like Status Arms And Hearts Teenage Liberation | Stay Positive | Heaven Is Whenever | Teeth Dreams | Constructive Summer Sequestered In Memphis One For The Cutters Navy Sheets Lord, I'm Discouraged Yeah Sapphire Both Crosses Stay Positive Magazines Joke About Jamaica Slapped Actress | The Sweet Part Of The City Soft In The Center The Weekenders The Smidge Rock Problems We Can Get Together Hurricane J Barely Breathing Our Whole Lives A Slight Discomfort | I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You Spinners The Only Thing The Ambassador On With The Business Big Cig Wait A While Runner's High Almost Everything Oaks | Ask Her For Adderall Cheyenne Sunrise Two Handed Handshake 40 Bucks Spectres | Touchless Ascension Blues Going on a Hike Separate Vacations Criminal Fingers | Records and Tapes Saddle Shoes Look Alive |
You're right that I don't include The Bear and the Maiden Fair or Take Me Out to the Ball Game. But more importantly, I've never heard of Don't Call Them Twinkies or Just Sayin'! So I'm going to get on those pronto. And obviously it's possible that there are other tracks I've missed, too. With the whole list out there, maybe you see something else I've passed over? And in the meantime, back to the story. We covered a lot of Act III already: the songs that I've classified as background (SM, CA), general scene (TSPotC), Jesse relationship baseline (HH, CSongs), and relationship complications (40B, WaW, WCGT; MPADJs, RP; YLHF). We've also basically covered everything in the next bucket, which I'll call "problems intensifying": on Jesse's side, we have Hurricane J, Magazines, and Big Cig; on Mary's side, we have Yeah Sapphire. Just a few notes here to add to what we said before: Obviously the jealousy situation is unsustainable, and there are other pressures. Jesse's threatening to leave [Magazines]: Second dates and lipstick tissues New York gets pretty heavy, girl, I hope it doesn't crush you and in the meantime she's a ticking time bomb [Hurricane J]: Hurricane Jesse's gonna crash into the harbor this summer. She don't want to wait till she gets older But Charlemagne is stuck in his holding pattern, and can't break out of it [BCig]: This little tryst is hard to quit. So we just sit here and live with it. In fact, Jesse's half crashing into the boys in the harbor bars already ("she's got boys on board and boys on deck" [Magazines]); 40 Bucks tells us one of these stories, and implies the existence of others; "Second dates and lipstick tissues" [Magazines] alludes to ongoing episodes of blowjobs on second dates, and fixing her lipstick afterwards (see "Sucking off each other at the demonstrations, making sure their makeup's straight" [SBS]). I had thought before that Charlemagne's "She used to fool around with some friends of mine" [BCig] referred to the fact that she'd jumped the Narrator early on [SM], but that was just a one-time thing; on further consideration I think he must be referring to his so-called "Uptown friends" [CF], that is, the Skins. He pulled Jesse out of that St. Paul harbor scene and got her off the speed once [SM], but she's going to go back to it for real if he doesn't make up his mind soon. For her part, Mary's growing increasingly unhappy, even desperate. She wants Charlemagne but believes she can't have him, and has to sit by while Jesse does everything in her power to take him away. She also sees the future of her visions drawing nearer --- she knows that the things in her dreams will come to pass, and that Charlemagne is going to be crucified. Yeah Sapphire gives us information about both these points. Mary's the POV character of the song, and it's a vision of the future she's having, so there are a few things in it that we can't yet explain (including *why* she sees Charlemagne addressing her as "Sapphire"; we figured out the Mary / Sapphire Throne identification, but that still doesn't explain why he's not calling her by her own name). But to give a short summary: The whole song is framed as the portrait of a lousy boyfriend talking his way into another chance (I'm a mess; what am I supposed to do? yeah but you needed it; it turned out all right didn't it? blah blah empty promise), and concluding on the same note (cheap excuse): "I was just about to call you when you called." Again, this isn't an objective account of reality, this is Mary's perspective, with a heavy dramatic slant. But she's unhappy with Charlemagne, isolated and unhappy, and she's clinging to the hope that one day he'll come around and see how important she really is to him. With the hanging "dreams" at the end of the first part, her fantasy of the bad boyfriend turned appreciative shifts into a higher register: "It went just like you predicted / I swear there must be something in your dreams / And it all went down exactly like your visions." Suddenly he's grateful; he knows that she's saved his life somehow. "And I know you said don't call until I'm clean" ... but "I'm not drunk, I'm cut, I'm gushing blood" (it's yet another variant of the crucifixion vision: "she saw him gushing blood from wide open wounds and she decided that she loved him" [HM]) ... "And I need someone to come and pick me up." He sees it all now, he needs her and loves her now: "I was a skeptic at first, but these miracles work." In the dream, she both saves his life and gets him finally for herself. But in reality, she's running out of time. There isn't a date attached to this song, but like the others in the early Act III timeframe it's somewhere around the summer of 2003. Charlemagne's 32 years old now. The crucifixion of Christ is a year away. Next up: Mary hatches a plan. Thanks for hanging in there, and thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 11, 2016 0:46:24 GMT -5
No worries, and yeah, doing a bit at a time is probably easiest. I'll catch up. Earlier, you asked about separating the Narrator from Craig. There were a lot of substantial thoughts in there, so let me take what you said a little out of order: Like you, when I first heard the song Stay Positive, I figured it was just Craig from the Hold Steady addressing the fans. Later on I put together the line "when the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen" with Massive Nights, and realized that at least that much of it was from the story. The truth is that I only ever made progress through this thing a line at a time anyway, so I wasn't really thinking about which lines in the song were whose yet; and then soon afterward I heard the Brian Koppelman interview with Craig and Tad ( link), in which Craig specifically talks about the song Stay Positive. Here's an excerpt starting at 55:00: So there you go. I think the "we couldn't have done this if it wasn't for you" part is Craig Finn singing. But there's also a block of lines, including "the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen," that are related to the story and that come out in the Narrator's voice. I think Craig's definitely having it both ways, and "blend" is a good word. Lines like "we opened for the Stones" [AHfA] and "I'd already moved out to New York City" [CSTLN] are obviously true of Craig Finn. But the same songs have "Now Holly won't say hi to me" [AHfA] and "When St. Theresa came to Holly / I wasn't even at that party" [CSTLN], which are obviously part of the story. It doesn't seem like this is "flipping in and out of the world" in the SPositive sense --- both statements belong to sentences that are clearly in-story, and after all there's no problem with believing that the Narrator, the character, opened for the Stones & moved out to NYC. In short, it seems to me that Craig is using autobiographical elements in a two-sided way. Part of that is just that he likes the double entendres. Part of it is that, like Odysseus, he's using a story about himself to enhance his mythic status & the status of his vocation. The strict premise should probably be that the Narrator is a fictional character who happens to reflect on Craig Finn at points. But there still seems to be a lot of blending at the edges. Last thing I'd say about this is that there's no rule to tell whether something is in-story or not; the Test for that gets applied afterward, after you pay close attention to everything and see which interpretations get you the furthest without blowing up. For example, like you, I can't see anything that makes Touchless fit the story (he reuses a couple of common ideas, maybe, but there's no other relation I can see). But closer listening might reveal that I'm wrong about that. For the record, out of the 86 Hold Steady songs I'm aware of (excluding Ballad of the Midnight Hauler and covers), I believe only 8 are strictly unrelated to the story (note in the Koppelman interview above how Craig struggles to come up with a second example after Soft in the Center). I've mentioned that Soft in the Center, Spectres, For Boston, and Touchless are on that list of 8. More about the others soon. I agree with that; at this point Craig has clearly shifted his focus to the parts of the story where Mary, the Narrator, and Charlemagne are in their 30's, and away from the crazy stuff in their 20's. (There's a lot of material from their 30's on BAGIA, too, but subtler episodes get more play on Stay Positive.) Part of that might be that he has more to fill in around the later parts of the story. But it's surely also true that, with time, he's become less interested in writing about, say, Charlemagne in the ER than he was early on. And that seems normal to me. We all develop, and he's been living with this story for a really long time. The only literary parallel to this kind of narrow long-term focus I can think of is James Joyce, who turned a short story written in 1904 (there are a dozen or so pages which survive) into a series of longer treatments that finally ended up getting stretched out into Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, finished in 1922. That's 18 years working mostly on one story, and if "Charlemagne in Sweatpants" was first put on paper in 2001 or so (see the 2008 Independent interview: link), then Craig's not far behind. It's not surprising to see him try to come at it fresh. So, back to the story. We were talking about songs that detail "relationship complications" in Act III. There's one of these songs for Charlemagne and Mary too: Your Little Hoodrat Friend. Let's review for a minute what we know about the context of this song: - Mary and Jesse regularly meet up with Charlemagne and the Narrator to drink and to go to theaters & parties. - Mary's in love with Charlemagne but won't let him touch her (substituting the townie Skins as lovers instead). - Jesse's in love with Charlemagne and is waiting for him to go to New York with her. - Charlemagne seriously wants Jesse to go to New York, but won't go with her because he's sticking around for Mary, with whom he's in love in his turn. - Charlemagne and Jesse (always with Jesse taking the lead) are in the meantime having a lot of "pretty big" sex. It's a total jealousy clusterfuck. The girls are seeing each other in Charlemagne's company all the time, and though nothing is open, each of them knows damn well what's going on with the other. Mary's jealous of Jesse because she's got Charlemagne's body. Jesse's jealous of Mary because she's got Charlemagne's soul. We understand now what the formerly puzzling lines from Criminal Fingers are about: Doing dishes in the kitchen I had the first of many visions I see trouble for the both of us Jesse doesn't have visions, of course. Like her lies in 40 Bucks, this one is transparent: she only claims (lamely) to be seeing them in a desperate bid to compete with Mary (desperate, because she's alarmed that she's really lost him this time: "this time I don't think that I can wait for you"). So now let's look at Your Little Hoodrat Friend itself. We already went over the early part of this song, with the argument that the "little hoodrat friend" (just in this song, not any of the "hoodrats" in C&N, HH or HaRRF) is Jesse. But now that we know the context, we can unpack most of the rest, including some things that we missed in the first few verses. Again, the POV character is Charlemagne, responding to Mary's jealous accusation that he's getting with Jesse. Your little hoodrat friend makes me sick But after I get sick I just get sad 'Cause it burns being broke, hurts to be heartbroken And always being both must be a drag Charlemagne protests to Mary, and protests far too much, that he's not doing anything with her little hoodrat friend Jesse. She makes him sick, he says; she makes him sad too, because she's always broke (true, but only true because she spends all her money to get high with him [HH] and other boys [40B], or on cigarettes [SM, 40B, BCig]) and always heartbroken (over boyfriends, but mostly over him [SM, 40B, WaW, Spinners]). (The words "burns" and "drag" have additional force in reference to Jesse the cig girl.) She's been calling me again She's been calling me again She's been calling him, he complains; then he repeats the complaint. The emphasis is a little funny, because Mary's been calling him too ("I was just about to call you when you called" [YS], "she wants to meet me back uptown" [ABlues]). Your little hoodrat friend's been calling me again And I can't stand all the things that she sticks into her skin Like sharpened ballpoint pens and steel guitar strings She says it hurts, but it's worth it Jesse's been calling me again, Charlemagne says; he can't stand all the things she sticks into her skin ("She pokes around with a paper clip" [BCig]), like sharpened ballpoint pens (from waitress gear?) and steel guitar strings (from her musician boyfriends [40B, JaJ]). She says it hurts, but it's worth it. It's kind of funny that Charlemagne would stop to psychoanalyze Jesse while he's pretending to be repulsed; what's that about? Well, Jesse can endure a little pain for something that's worth it; what about Mary? Maybe he's suspecting that the "migraine headaches" [CA] are kind of bullshit after all? Tiny little text etched into her neck It said "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" She's got blue black ink and it's scratched into her lower back Says "Damn right, He'll rise again" Yeah, damn right, you'll rise again Damn right, you'll rise again Charlemagne alleges that Jesse also has a couple of homemade tattoos. There's one on her neck that says "Jesus lived and died for all your sins," an echo of the forgiveness Jesse described when talking about Charlemagne as her Jesus [SM], and another on her lower back that says "Damn right, He'll rise again." Damn right you'll rise again (with the obvious sexual overtone), Charlemagne thinks to himself, even if you think you're done: "this little tryst is hard to quit" [BCig]. But now this critique is really starting to hit close to home. We know about Mary's "sleeveless lifestyle / Girl you gotta cover that" [HM] tramp stamp; "the scratches on my back, they formed into a choir / and belted out a chorus" [SK] and the "belt it out like backscratch choirs" [NS] are also hers, and as we listen to "Damn right, you'll rise again" we get an idea of what the chorus being belted out is (this is another crazy thing like the Narrator in OWL referencing the saxophone in HM). The girl in One for the Cutters wears a "turtleneck sweater" [OftC] in court for a reason; it's a good bet she's got a tat on her neck too. Who is Charlemagne actually talking about here? As in similar cases (for example CSongs or HJ, where he's talking ambiguously about Jesse and Holly at the same time), it looks like he's talking about *both* Jesse and Mary. Just as Jesse claimed to have visions in imitation of Mary [CF], it looks like she got herself some copycat tattoos; so Charlemagne's description of her is clinically accurate. But the vehemence of his protest is directed straight at Mary. The definite proof of this is in the next two verses (skipping "dusted in the dark" and Charlemagne's three-times denial of Jesse): Your little hoodrat friend got me high though We were 17 and stuck up up in Osseo She said it's funny how true love gets troubled by stillwater And washed up in the Mississippi River Her claddagh ring was pointed at the people She said St. Theresa came to me in dreams She said I ain't gonna do anything sexual to you I'm kinda saving myself for the scene The killer line here is "We were 17 and stuck up up in Osseo," honestly one of the hardest lines in all the songs. When I first tackled it, I had understood that everything up to this point was talking about Jesse, and that "Your little hoodrat friend got me high though" was a reference to Jesse paying for Charlemagne's drugs in HH. But with "we were 17" I was at a dead stop. It is absolutely clear that Charlemagne is much older than Jesse, even before you do the math; it is equally clear that Charlemagne was in Lynn at 17. I probably checked the liner notes four times to check that it really was "stuck up up" and not "stuck up." And Osseo totally baffled me. Finally, finally, I realized what I had not before, that these two verses are a massive volley of sarcasm being unloaded straight at Mary (and it's only from that point that I was able to work back through the song and see her as the increasingly direct target of "she's been calling me again," "it hurts but it's worth it," and the tattoo comments). Charlemagne doesn't have the firmness of character to make his protest head-on, but he's a genius of ass-backwards innuendo. Look at what he's saying here: - "Your little hoodrat friend got me high though"; it's true that Jesse has gotten him high up in her bedroom [HH], and on the face of it this is just another admission, like the earlier ones, that it's all right because it stops short of him "getting with" her. But what he's really referring to is to Gideon getting Mary high when they were 17 [ASD, SN], both of them stuck up (her a "priss" and a "princess" [YGD, C&N, A&H, ASD], him a townie from Osseo, MN but claiming to be from New York City [BCamp liner notes, ASD, CatCT "small town cops are like swarms of flies," as if he weren't from a much smaller town]. For "stuck up" see also "stuck around with all those stickpin dolls" [PP]; if in fact Mary was still 17 in the ASD timeframe, as seems likely from this, then Charlemagne's specifically talking about Gideon introducing her to speed shooting [ASD]. - "She said it's funny how true love gets troubled by stillwater / And washed up in the Mississippi River ([liner notes] And she washed me in the Mississippi river)": this is exactly the kind of innocent double-entendre that Jesse lets drop in HH, and on the face of it he's saying that she's actually given up on her love for him since nothing is happening (still water); but the ulterior meaning is a reproach to Mary for getting with Gideon who later, he thinks, couldn't stand Holly's awkward silences when high, and murdered her by drowning [CatCT, "stillwater" = "awkward silences / banging stops" in BCamp, "Holly can't speak / has to go to get some sleep" in BBlues]. (For "it's funny how ..." see also "Thinking things are funny when they really ain't that funny" [HM].) - "Her claddagh ring was pointed at the people": It's true that Jesse's not in a relationship (the meaning of the claddagh ring when worn pointing away from the wearer), or, more to the point, that her ring is pointing at practically everyone, and not at him; but again, the real point is a barb at Mary, who is living at the club and fucking all the townie Skins there [Ambassador, ABlues, etc.]. The claddagh ring, together with "Ginger" [Swish], identifies Mary as an Irish redhead. (If the running ambiguity continues to hold here, maybe Jesse is Irish too.) - "She said St. Theresa came to me in dreams": he gets it wrong in saying that St. Theresa appeared, rather than Jesus, not unlike how Jesse gets it wrong when she claims to be having visions [CF]; but again the point is the same, it's Mary who is the target, with her pious claims and impious behavior. - "She said I ain't gonna do anything sexual to you / I'm kinda saving myself for the scene": It's true that Jesse has been fucking the music boys down at the harbor bars, but this pales next to Mary; and the exasperating thing for Charlemagne is that, while as an attribution to Jesse it's completely over the top, as a reproach of Mary it's dead literal --- she really *won't* do anything sexual with him [AB, OftC, CA, YS], and she really is saving herself for the scene [Ambassador, ABlues, etc.]! Skipping "dusted in the dark" again (and "waiting for my ride" later): She said city center used to be the center of our scene Now city center's over, no one really goes there Back then we used to drink beneath this railroad bridge Some nights the bus wouldn't even stop, there were just too many kids But after all that, Charlemagne goes on to say something about Jesse that's a little separate from the other assertions (the protest and the reproach), namely, a matter-of-fact report of her innocence. She said they used to party in City Center (scene of Holly's prostitution [Swish]), and then under a railroad bridge down near Payne Avenue/Lowertown/Railroad Island in St. Paul (see "railroad yard" [LA]); she's grown up, oblivious, in the middle of the world that led to Holly's death (these are the same bright comments that she makes in HH, and his reaction is the same). What's going to happen to her? That's enough. Tomorrow we can start talking about how the events of the crucifixion are set in motion. Thanks for reading all of that, and please remember Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 9, 2016 23:58:57 GMT -5
I can identify with not wanting to come off as possessed, ha. Anyway, your English is plenty good; it's also true that Craig uses a lot of subtle/ambiguous/technical language that can throw even native English speakers off. "Jumped him in" literally means "initiated him into the gang" with the implication of physical abuse, so you're right about that. The fact that they got into his head when they did that (as reported in YGD) happened as a result, but isn't part of being "jumped in" per se. But there are lots of these things. "Hit it again" in YGD had me confused for quite a while; it wasn't until I could line up all three prom songs that I was sure I knew which sense of "hit" was meant. "Pinned" was confusing too. And so on. Let me come back to your "origin" question: "whether Craig had all of this sorted out before AKM, or if the story kind of evolved as songs and albums went by." I'm absolutely certain that he had the fundamental story all sorted out before they ever started recording. The six main characters and most of the major events of the story are present in AKM already, even if some episodes only get a half a line. Most importantly, there's no way (IMHO) that these things could have been brought together in a satisfying story later, if they'd just been written out randomly at the beginning. With Separation Sunday we have even more proof of planning; not only do we again see all six characters present on the album, along with a lot more detail about the later events of the story, but we have Craig's own testimony about his preparation. In the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link), he said: But having the fundamental story sorted out is different from having all the details in place. It's clear that he's added a lot of detail and decoration around the main bones of the story as they've gone along. For example: - Shepard is a new character from the Teeth Dreams timeframe [IHTWTDFY, SS, LA]; it certainly looks like Craig said, "hey, I want to talk a little more about the Skins now. They must have had a leader; let's put a name to that face and flesh him out a little bit." - In Heaven is Whenever, he poured a lot into the perspective of Charlemagne and the Narrator at an older age, in some complicated relationship situations. These things definitely fit the previously-constructed story. But they also feel like the fleshing out of something that might not have been more than a summary sentence ("For a few years ...") when it was first put together. - Sarah from Teeth Dreams certainly looks like a whole new chapter. - Gideon coming back to sanity was part of the story from the beginning, but the Houston/touchdown metaphor seems to be new with Teeth Dreams. - Gideon pulling a magic trick at a particular time (can't spoil yet) was always part of the story, but the detail about him using a pipe made from a Pringles can for the purpose seems to have been new with BAGIA. And so on, and so on. Plus, Craig can keep spinning out more stuff as long as he wants. But none of this conflicts with the idea that there's a well-architected story underneath it all, with motivations and dramatic developments that have been clear in his mind from the beginning. Does that make sense? Let me keep going with the story, I'll respond to the autobiographical thing, and maybe some of the other stuff too, tomorrow. Have to keep the forward momentum. We've covered the background [SM, CA], the general scene [TSPotC], the baseline situation with Jesse [HH, CSongs]. On top of those, we get some songs about relationship complications for the different "couples": Charlemagne and Jesse, the Narrator and Mary, and Charlemagne and Mary. There are three early "relationship complications" songs about Charlemagne and Jesse: 40 Bucks, Wait a While, and We Can Get Together. (Hurricane J, Magazines, and Big Cig are also about Charlemagne and Jesse, but seem to come later, since they all talk about an impending end to things, one way or another.) We've already talked about 40 Bucks and Wait a While. We Can Get Together is pretty straightforward; like Hornets! Hornets!, it's another story about Charlemagne and Jesse meeting in her room and listening to her records. But there are some lines worth noticing: She said Husker Du got huge. But they started in St. Paul. This is one of the pieces of evidence that Jesse lives, as well as works, in St. Paul. A second is "your Uptown friends came by the bar last night" [CF]; the Uptown friends are the Skins, dealing "Silver metal flake up on Lyndale and Lake" [R&T]; unlike Charlemagne and the Narrator up on Hennepin, Jesse doesn't live in Uptown. A third is "Tell her to stay in St. Paul" [AHfA]; we can't get into the context of this song yet, but even now we can see that "see if she'll send cigarettes" and "it's her favorite band" are tip-offs that the "she" of AHfA is Jesse. He wasn't just the drummer. He was someone's little brother. I still spin that single. But it don't sound that simple anymore. The "pure and simple love" that Jesse's looking for is proving plenty complicated; the loss of "someone's little brother" behind the complications seems to suggest the loss of Holly, Mary's younger cousin. And Charlemagne too is strugging with the complexity of his affection; that he has to "try so hard not to fall in love" [HH] is again shown when he thinks: Heaven is whenever We can get together. Sit down on your floor. And listen to your records. There are also two "relationship complications" songs about the Narrator and Mary: Most People Are DJs, and Rock Problems. Both songs are from the Narrator's POV, and there's lots of evidence that both are about the same party: - The girl who's got him cornered in the kitchen appears in both. - The trashbin/ice machine joke appears in both. - The writer of RP is clearly a critic in the MPADJs sense. - The Narrator wants to be ripped out of his "little world" in RP, and pleads that "it's a big world" in MPADJs. It's another story of the Narrator following Mary out to a party, pleading with her to understand him and to change how she's living; like in Cheyenne Sunrise, she refuses to "sympathize" with him. But in the end, for now at least, he realizes that he's happy to be with her anyway. The girls want to go to the party. But no one's in any shape to drive. So we called up your guy And when he comes we're gonna ask for a ride. The Narrator, Charlemagne, Mary and Jesse are up at the place on Hennepin. The girls want to go to the party, but like in TSPotC, where they can't get their car off the curb, no one's in any shape to drive. So they call up one of Charlemagne's "numbers" [HH] to get some party stuff delivered, and when the guy comes, they're going to ask him for a ride. We get to the place. And she don't want to dance. She says she's not really into this track. She wants to know what's going on in the room that's all the way in the back. The Narrator is bummed because Mary's not even trying to dance now (compare later "she ain't come out dancing in some time" [LID]; the arc that went from "I didn't know you could dance like that" [OWL] in high school to "thought she was a dancer" [BBlues] has progressed). She just wants the action in the room all the way in the back. Back home we were listening to Catholic Boy I got hung up on the people who died. I didn't even want to go out Because I was way too fried. She said I just can't sympathize With your rock and roll problems. Isn't this what we wanted? Some major rock and roll problems. The Narrator was hung up about Holly having died after getting too far into drugs [HF, BCamp, etc.], and is worried about the same thing happening to Mary. But when he confronts her once again about it [HM, CSunrise], she tells him that she just can't sympathize, and after all, isn't this rock and roll lifestyle exactly what he wanted? We recognize yet another variation on the "you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with" [YGD] theme; in fact, this theme is framed in the exact same rock-and-roll-singer context in Going on a Hike: We were hanging at a rock and roll club It was painted just like hell The bar was plywood painted black They have skull mugs up on the shelves They throw such killer parties But some nights you don't feel so well But you shouldn't be the singer in a be yourself band If you don't want to be yourself The lead-in to the GoaH variation is clearly an allusion to the metal bar, with the killer parties; with this for comparison, we understand that the Narrator is "frightened" [RP] of the Rock Problems party for a reason. But this is what you chose, Mary tells him. Back to MPADJs for a minute: Well, hold steady Ybor City You're up to your neck in the sweat and wet confetti If you want to get a little bit light in the heady It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy "Ybor City," the state of wild party insanity, might be getting light-in-the-head high, but things are going to get heavy along the way. To illustrate, the Narrator recalls the metal bar: They're jamming jetskis into the jetty now With some guy who looks like Rocco Siffredi And I've heard he's been dead once already It's going down right now in Lowertown They're skipping off the good ship U.S.S.S.S.S.S.S.S.S. Sexuality Searching for the merchant with the five second delivery They're slipping soft rock into their setlist now They got some new guy that looks just like Phil Lynott We're stumbling but I think we're still in it The "jetty" is the harbor; Charlemagne ("Rocco Siffredi," "dead once already") is getting pummeled. Mary's Unified Scene Sexuality is "going down" in Lowertown (adjacent to Payne Avenue); she's looking for the "merchant" with the instant high. Gideon ("soft" [SN, Knuckles], "rock" [Ambassador, BCamp liner notes]) was the "new guy" in the Skins that night. Things are getting heavy tonight too, and they're stumbling; but they're still in it. It's a big world, girl, and I can't understand it We're tiny white specks on a bright blue planet I was a teenage ice machine I kept it cool in coolers and I drank until I dreamed And when I dream I always dream about the scene All these kids they look like little lambs looking up at me I was a Twin Cities trash bin I did everything they'd give me I'd jam it into my system She got me cornered by the kitchen I said I'll do anything but listen To some weird-talking chick who just can't understand it That we're hot soft spots on a hard rock planet Here again the Narrator has a confrontation with Mary ("weird-talking chick"). He tries to explain to her about his rock and roll dream of the Unified Scene, with all the little lambs looking up at him on stage; he tells her how he felt they'd arrived there together, back on prom night years before [OWL, MN, SPositive]. But she can't or won't understand what he's saying, and for his part he doesn't understand what to do as a tiny white speck on her bright blue (Mary/Sapphire) planet. He fires a parting shot: Baby take off your beret Everyone's a critic and most people are DJs And everything gets played He calls her a DJ, playing the "records and tapes" [R&T] of her visions over and over. Take off your beret, he says; take a risk, make your own music! Working backwards from the doctor to the drugs From the packie to the taxi to the cabbie to the club A thousand kids will fall in love in all these clubs tonight A thousand other kids will end up gushing blood tonight Two thousand kids won't get all that much sleep tonight Two thousand kids they still feel pretty sweet tonight Yeah, and I still feel pretty sweet The song ends with a description of this party going wrong like others, and what was "recreational" once again ending up "kinda medical" [HSL]. But in the meantime, if you can rewind from all the bad things in the wind --- - Mary ("A thousand kids will fall in love in all these clubs tonight") - Charlemagne ("A thousand other kids will end up gushing blood tonight") - Gideon ("Two thousand kids won't get all that much sleep tonight" [see Knuckles, R&T, TL]) - the Narrator ("Two thousand kids they still feel pretty sweet tonight") --- then the Narrator still feels pretty sweet. And this (skipping the rest of the confrontation in the kitchen, and the encounter with the critic) is the same way Rock Problems ends, too: Didn't want to go out But it felt really right When someone put on Heaven Tonight. Had a moment in the middle of In Color and In Black and White. Sing along to the Southern Girls. Rip me out of my little world. He didn't want to stay in "because the walls were so grey" [RP]; that "grey" world with the "tiny white specks" [MPADJs] is the "little world" of "In Black and White"; he didn't want to go out either, "because I was way too frightened" [RP], but when he did go, he had a moment of breakthrough into the "big world" [MPADJs] of "In Color," the "bright blue planet" of Mary, Queen of Heaven ("Heaven Tonight"), his "Southern Girl" from Tennessee/Memphis/Graceland ("Hail Mary, full of grace"). I'm kind of flying through this stuff just to get it out and get on with the story. I hope I'm not being too quick about it, and that piling up things we've already dealt with (like in that last paragraph) is acceptable shorthand. Will wrap up with the "relationship complications" for Charlemagne and Mary tomorrow, and then go further. Thanks for reading along and, as always, for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 8, 2016 23:59:23 GMT -5
Thanks, muzzleofbees. I'm psyched that this is hitting home in some way. (Your English is great by the way, if you hadn't told me I would have thought you were English yourself, with the Terry Butcher avatar :-) You open up some good topics, too. I need to respond to them over a couple of days so I can keep moving forward with the story, but yeah. These are definitely things I've thought about myself. About the idea that "Craig Finn is the most underappreciated songwriter ever" ... I have two takes on this. There are days I can't believe THS aren't as big as the Stones, and the fact that they aren't seems like evidence of the poverty of our times. But I also think this is going to change. The fact that Craig was invited to do the American Songbook concert is a step in that direction. I believe that what he's written here is a great American story, and I'm willing to bet that in 50 years, his work is going to be a recognized part of the national literary canon in a way that even Dylan's never was. What's more, people are going to be listening to the music and amazed at how these guys fucking rocked it. Sometimes it'll be Tad doing the heavy lifting and sometimes it'll be Craig. But this shit has legs and the appreciation isn't over. You wrote: "An whether we want to really bury ourselves in the lyrics and the stories, prefer to go to shows and lose ourselves completely, or both, I think we should value that." Totally agree. I don't think there's anything but win in having more people on board, however they're plugging in. I can't unsee what I've seen, and I do feel an obligation to try to explain it well. But if someone isn't interested in that, and wants to relate to the music in a totally different way, how can that be anything other than cool? I wonder a lot about Lifter Puller, too, not going to lie. Funny you should bring that up today. For possibly obvious reasons, there are a lot of mornings when I wake up with a THS line on a loop in my head. (Woke up with "her claddagh ring was pointed at the people" three days in a row in August, a personal record.) This morning it was "Mouths and hands, hands and mouths / So many shows where nobody comes out," with that kind of metallic synth in the background, and I was remembering what bigontheinside said recently ( link), that Curves and Nerves is "very lifter pullery." I've seen the wild song titles, too, of course, so all these things have kind of combined in my head to form an idea, probably completely wrong, of what it must be like. But yeah, I'm curious. Let me get to the origin and the autobiographical questions tomorrow, I just need to get on with the story or I'm going to crash here. But before I do, let me say that I'm really sorry about your friend. I don't know what to say except that this cancer thing is brutal, and it sucks. Thanks too for your concern for Still Alive Carl. To be honest, he's got good care and people around to help. He really doesn't need anything other than to have it go miraculously into remission. It can still happen. All right. Over the weekend I broke up the Act III material into different buckets; I say "buckets" because the songs don't really fall in chronological order, it's more like different songs cover different parts of the picture. We've already done the background in SM/CA and the Jesse baseline in HH/CSongs; but there's one song more than any other that establishes the general Act III scene, and that's The Sweet Part of the City. This is the song that establishes the characters' new location (up on Hennepin, in Uptown, in the sweet part of the city) and the new rhythms of their life (the thermos, the matinees, the occasional fights, the highs), but all at a distance from the building complications that are going to move the story forward. The POV character is the Narrator. Back when we were living up on Hennepin. She kept threatening to turn us in. At night she mostly liked us. We used to pass around a thermos. Some nights she looked gorgeous. The Narrator describes a new period; it's a general picture he's painting, but it's focused around, or building up toward, the summer of 2003. The Narrator and Charlemagne have left Nicollet & 66th to move to a place on Hennepin in Uptown; Mary might technically be included in that "we" on Hennepin, but she's basically living down at the metal bar [Ambassador]. Charlemagne and Jesse are working at a restaurant/bar in St. Paul [CSongs, Magazines, HJ, WCGT, etc.]. Some evenings they used to sit and pass around a thermos, suggesting summer (the year 2003 is back-calculated from Mary's 33 [SN], which is coming up). Jesse would join them; mostly she liked them, sometimes she'd threaten to turn them in --- we recall that Jesse is the one who has ups and downs in the nights and mornings [TSPotC, Magazines, HJ, 40B, BCig], that "she isn't always funny in the night" [Magazines]; some nights she was gorgeous ("I know that she's gorgeous" [BCig]). We were living it. We delivered it. We didn't feel a thing. We were living in. The sweet part of the city. The parts with the bars and restaurants. We used to meet underneath the marquees. We used to nod off in the matinees. She always claimed that she was from Tennessee. Now it seems to me Like distance doesn't equal rate and time no more. It's like gravity doesn't apply. Everything sparkles and it feels like we're on wheels. It was dark but I guess that's the deal. He describes their life then. They were living it --- not out in the suburbs any more, but in the sweet part of the city, the parts with the bars and restaurants. They were dealing drugs ("we delivered it," see "delivery" [MPADJs], and Charlemagne's delivery of "party stuff" to Jesse [40B]), and taking plenty ("we didn't feel a thing"). The Narrator used to meet with Mary then, underneath the marquees of the Uptown theaters [ABlues]; there they would drink and talk [AE] and nod off in the matinees (she likes the daytime theaters because the movies in the dark are like her nighttime visions [MN, OWL, BCrosses]; that was the deal, it was dark). Mary always claimed that she was from Tennessee, but that doesn't seem quite like a real-world place; it's like distance isn't a precise thing any more (in fact she's from "Graceland," as in "Hail Mary full of grace" [BCrosses], more than from Memphis the city or Tennessee the state). It's like gravity doesn't apply either, when they're there: everything's sparkling and floating ("And everything is sparkling and everything's soft / Everything's just kind of floating" [GOAH], "We're dust in the spotlights, we're just kind of floating" [SA]). In fact, they're in the world of Mary's angelic visions: it "feels like they're on wheels" because they're "sailing off with cherubim" [SPayne]; the cherubim are on wheels, and on the back of the cherubim is the Sapphire throne of God [Ezekiel 10] (cf. "wheelchairs" [PJ]). As we noted earlier, this sapphire throne is identified with the Virgin Mary, called in early church hymns the "living Throne of God." Mary is tapped into a vision of the end times that is very different from Charlemagne's "revelation songs" [CF] with "four guys on horses and violent red visions" [CatCT]; which way things are going to go isn't clear yet. St. Theresa showed up wearing see-through. It was standard issue. We went out to get some more wine. But it's a long haul to the corner store from the center of the universe. When you can't get your car off the curb. Back to the night on Hennepin, where the Narrator and Charlemagne and Jesse are passing around the thermos: Mary (St. Theresa) showed up wearing see-through; it was "standard issue" for her, who always went around in tight/skimpy/revealing clothing [Swish, HM, SPotC, NS, Weekenders]. The Narrator and Mary went out to get some more wine, because that's what she always drinks [MM, YGD, MN, LID, SPotC, Spinners, R&T] (for a reason having to do with her visions, which we'll get to when we talk about R&T). But it's hard to get from where they are, flying high at the "center of the universe," to the real-world corner store, when, unlike the fantastic cherubim wheels, they can't get her real-world car off the curb. We were living it. We delivered it. We didn't feel a thing. We were in heaven in The sweet part of the city. The parts with the bars and restaurants. So we shot ourselves out into outer space. It was tough to place the aftertaste. It was stark but it was spacious. It's a long way from Cedar-Riverside to Cedars-Sinai Three times St. Paul to Cheyenne. It's a long way from Sacramento too. We were bored so we started a band. We'd like to play for you. Continuing from the refrain, they shot themselves out into outer space with the strong stuff. They were pretty far out there: they didn't feel much ("didn't feel a thing"; "It was tough to place the aftertaste, it was stark but it was spacious."). And now the theme of unreal place and incalculable distance comes back. Just as Uptown is the center of the universe vis-a-vis the unreachable corner store, the Twin Cities are the center of the universe vis-a-vis the unreachable rest of the country. Cedar-Riverside (in Minneapolis) to Cedars-Sinai (in California) is approximately three times the distance from St Paul to Cheyenne, but you can't get to either place; Charlemagne can't make a success of his drug dealing (="California"), and Mary can't get back to the unspoiled purity of their first experience of the Cities (="Cheyenne"). They can't get Holly back either (who died in the baptism="Sacramento"). They're stuck in funny place here, and will be until trouble forces their hand. But in the meanwhile, in their boredom, they started a band; they'd like to play for you. (This, at the end, is what lets us know that the Narrator is the POV character). More tomorrow, and thanks for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 7, 2016 17:43:32 GMT -5
Chips Ahoy! is the other song that covers early events in the Act III timeframe.
This is the story of how Charlemagne went from appreciating the fact that Mary could be relied upon to "stay" [SG], to being totally in love. Southtown Girls lets us know that there's more to it on his side, but it's hard not to notice that she's a small-timer's dream girl: she means free money and drugs, one rigged bet at a time.
The song's basic story is straightforward, but there's some interesting detail in it that's worth calling out:
At first I thought that shit hit on some tip that she got from some other boy
It's mentioned only in passing, but Charlemagne is jealous (the video for the song plays this up); Mary won't let him touch her, but at the same time she's "pretty much crashing" [Ambassador] down at the metal bar, bleeding on the bed, "getting nailed against dumpsters behind townie bars" [OftC].
Some nights the painkillers make the pain even worse
The song hints darkly at the reason why she won't let him touch her. Is it because he's abused her in the past? Is it because the gift of precognition comes at some terrible physical price? In fact, the reason isn't either of these ...
She gets migraine headaches When she does it too much
She always does it too much
The whole thing is sad and star-crossed, but this line made me laugh --- put it together, and she *always* has a migraine. Charlemagne's living through the most epic, off-the-deep-end case of "Not tonight, dear" the world's ever seen, and still hasn't figured out that the headaches are a lie. Can't spoil the real reason yet, but we're getting there.
I remember now what I forgot two days ago, so back to Jesse for a moment. In Certain Songs, "roughly twenty years old" is meant to split the difference between early-twenties Jesse and late-teens Holly as the object of Charlemagne's descriptions. In the opening lines about kids on the east coast, he's thinking of Holly being "coaxed out" from Lynn by the promise of a certain perfect life in Minneapolis. But as he looks at Jesse and sees the world she's moving through, he can't help but see the parallels to where Holly ended up:
I guess you're old enough to know Kids out on the west coast are taking off their clothes Screwing in the surf and going out to shows They get high and ride around in GTOs
- "Kids out on the west coast are taking off their clothes": Jesse's shirttails/socks; Holly went out to the west coast to take off her clothes (porn) - "Screwing in the surf and going out to shows": Jesse's jukebox/music boys in harbor bars; Holly went out to shows to screw (prostitution) - "They get high and ride around in GTOs": Jesse gets high in her car; Holly got high riding around in big black cars (traveling between motels and malls with Gideon)
Charlemagne has certain things scratched into his soul as well.
While on the subject, we've said that Charlemagne is trying to persuade Jesse to leave St. Paul for the east coast [CSongs, Magazines]. Jesse herself has a reason to want to go to New York, alluded to in Magazines:
New York gets pretty heavy, girl, I hope it doesn't crush you Magazines and daddy issues I know you're pretty pissed, I hope you'll still let me kiss you The "daddy issues" we already know about; "magazines," not otherwise explained, are the reason she wants to go (and eventually does go, as shown by the "inbound trains" and "two years off some prairie town" of Spinners). She wants to be in magazines. Spectres isn't part of the story, but Craig expands on the same idea there:
When all we really want Is to be in magazines
And Jesse herself alludes to her ambition in Sketchy Metal:
You get your picture in the paper if he lets you in his trailer
Further into the Act III story tomorrow. Thanks in the meantime for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 6, 2016 17:21:03 GMT -5
Now that we see Charlemagne and Jesse's relationship for the two-sided Freudian clusterfuck that it is, we can take a moment to appreciate that sometimes a big cig isn't just a big cig. There's got to be another reason why the ladies love Charlemagne, right? In Big Cig, we get this about Jesse: She always likes the big ones best. (And the next line too, since she always foots the bill for her boyfriends [HH, 40B]: "You get more for your money" [BCig].) This gives us a little more insight into the goal of her "experiments" [BCig]: Some nights she's a scientist. She pulls me into experiments. Squeezes hard and Charts the forward progress. Charlemagne's got a huge dick; Jesse, fascinated, is literally trying to see how big she can make it ("Damn right you'll rise again [YLHF]). Their first time seems to have been an eye-opener in that respect; as Charlemagne describes it, We met at a benefit. It was a pretty big opening. Apparently his dimensions are well-known; in Most People Are DJs, the Narrator (POV character) describes Charlemagne as ... some guy who looks like Rocco Siffredi And I've heard he's been dead once already Among porn stars, Rocco Siffredi is proverbial for the size of his dick. Mary too adores Charlemagne for this reason (just as St. Theresa had ecstatic visions of Jesus or the seraph piercing her with his "long spear of gold"; see wikipedia). We already talked about the description of her prom-night vision in Ascension Blues, but that last line deserves a second read: She said he looked like Jimmy Connors She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein She said we had a pretty huge time As noted earlier, "he tasted like the Calvin Klein" (the shorts) is a reference to her blowing Charlemagne-Christ in vision; they had "a pretty huge time" all right. And this brings us full circle to Charlemagne in Sweatpants: Tramps like us and we like tramps Charlemagne's got something in his sweatpants "Charlemagne in sweatpants" isn't just the title of the song; it's the origin of the story, the first three words of it that Craig wrote down; see the 2008 Independent interview ( link): It's the origin because this is how Mary sees Charlemagne in her vision, looking like a townie, like Jimmy Connors, not in a knockoff necktie or a purple suit, but in sweatpants. With something really big in them, that makes all the tramps he likes super happy. I've said before that all the names in the story are significant. We've covered this for "Mary" and for "Shepard," and without yet explaining "Jesse" and "Hallelujah" we've shown that both are part of the Catholic liturgy of Mary, Queen of Heaven. There's a slam dunk explanation for "Gideon" which we'll get to. But Charlemagne is more difficult. Probably the standard explanation, that it's a reference to the "Did you feel like Jesus?" drug dealer in the Steely Dan song Kid Charlemagne, is right. But I suspect there's a joke in his literally being called "Big Charlie," too. Tomorrow I'll move ahead with the events of Act III a little bit. Thanks for reading, and thanks for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 5, 2016 20:59:21 GMT -5
Short one today. The fact that Charlemagne so strongly identifies Jesse with Holly explains, finally, what's going on in Certain Songs: Born into the only songs that everybody finally sings along and Hurricane J: But they didn't name her for a saint. They named her for a storm. So how's she supposed to think about How it's gonna feel in the morning? On the face of it there are a lot of problems with this. There never was a Hurricane Jesse (or even a Tropical Storm Jesse); there are on the other hand a variety of traditions for St. Jesse. So what exactly is Charlemagne talking about when he's saying this? The answer is that he's not talking about Jesse; he's talking about Holly, since when he looks at Jesse it's mostly Holly he sees. There is no St. Holly or St. Hallelujah; there was however a Hurricane Holly on October 22, 1976 (hat tip somuchjoy! link to discussion here). That's when Holly was conceived, and she was born in late July 1977, right on schedule "into the only songs that everybody finally sings along" (Only the Good Die Young and Paradise by the Dashboard Light, both released in 1977) [CSongs]. This date is a critical anchor in the timeline. Among other things, it allows us to date the Cheyenne Sunrise confrontation, the metal bar, Holly's party, Southtown Girls, and On with the Business to a narrow window in or around July 1996: - Beyond appealing to the "Industrial Age" theme [Weekenders], I haven't yet made the full case for the fact that it's Holly's 19th birthday party, but that's coming. - On with the Business refers to the "prick in the parking lot," which puts it after Southtown Girls, and refers the trip "down to the taverns" to some time "last week." - In Southtown Girls, Charlemagne is still showing signs of having been badly beaten, which puts it after the metal bar, and Holly's already gone, which puts it after the party. - Gideon shows up at Holly's party having already been jumped in, meaning that it too comes right after the metal bar. - Cheyenne Sunrise includes a prediction of the metal bar as the "next party." - Finally, there's evidence that the party is in the summertime; there are guys standing outside on the front lawn, Mary's wearing a tattered T-shirt, and Holly, Mary, and Gideon go outside (back around the building [MM]) to get busy. Certain Songs also mentions that Jesse is "roughly twenty years old," and Hurricane J says she's "twenty-two and banging around in bars." In the latter song, Charlemagne predicts that she's going to crash into the harbor bars "this summer" [HJ]; but this never happens due to the intervention of other events, the same events that include Mary getting high for the last time at 33 [SN]. Thanks to Records and Tapes, which tells us that Mary got high for the first time in "summer '88" [R&T], and Stevie Nix, which tells us that she got high for the first time at 17, we can date the "intervening events" to some time in the months prior to summer 2004 --- while Mary is still 33, but before Jesse crashes into the harbor. That's how we know that Jesse is born sometime between early 1981 and early 1982 (and we'll be able to date it even more precisely when we know more about what the "intervening events" entail). I feel like I forgot to add a couple of things there, but that's enough for now, we'll come back to the calendar later in any case. In the meantime, thank you for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 4, 2016 23:56:06 GMT -5
Thank you! Thanks for your username, too, seriously. That's a timely shot in the arm. All right ...!
Two small things I forgot yesterday. One, Craig establishes the double meaning of "banging" in MINTS already, earlier than Banging Camp and much earlier than HJ --- important, because Banging Camp is almost impossible to parse anyway, and would be harder without this confirmation. Two, it's after drowning Holly that Gideon goes to "Bay City" to work at the tire shop, and disappears for years (out of sight of the Narrator, Charlemagne, Mary, and the Skins). And that's how Act II ends.
On to Act III. This is the era of "living up on Hennepin" [TSPotC], with dates in the 2000's.
I'm doing this off the cuff, but I think the first reported events of the new era are the ones in Chips Ahoy! and Sketchy Metal. In Chips Ahoy!, we see Charlemagne's appreciation for Mary burst into the full flower of love, Charlemagne-style; we'll come back to that later. For now we want to follow the thread of Sketchy Metal back into the Jesse storyline.
We've already covered Sketchy Metal and related songs, but to summarize the events of early Act III: the Narrator continues to play shows and fall deeper into addiction [SM]. After one show he wakes up with Jesse, who's got hold of a backstage pass [SM]. At the next show, a benefit concert, he introduces Jesse and Charlemagne to each other [SM, Magazines, JaJ, BCig]. Charlemagne takes one look at this young girl shooting speed and takes charge of the situation, getting her cleaned up and off the heavy stuff [SM]. She falls for him, identifying him as a father figure in place of her absent bio-dad [40B, BCig, CF]. She gets him a job as a bartender at the Lowertown restaurant where she's a waitress, which he takes so he can keep an eye on her, but which he also exploits for its convenience as a place to deal from, because he's a fuckup like that [CSongs, CF, HJ, Magazines]. He tries to persuade her to leave for New York, to get her away from St. Paul, but she's waiting for him to come along, and he isn't going [CSongs, HJ, CF]. In the meantime, they have a complicated relationship with a lot of sex and fighting, both apparently at her instance, and a lot of kissing at his [YLHF, BCig, HJ, Magazines].
There are lots of questions surrounding the above, particularly about motivations. But now we can start answering them.
First off, we can now account for *both* halves of the psychologically screwy Jesse-Charlemagne relationship. She's obsessed with him because she identifies him with her father. But he's obsessed with her because he identifies her with Holly.
His decisive reaction when they met is due simply to having seen a pretty young girl (Holly was about 6 years younger than him; Jesse is about 10 years younger) on speed, and thinking: "it's Holly." (CiS tells us that he acted with the same decision the first time he met Holly, too, something that's otherwise uncharacteristic of him.) In both HF and CatCT, Charlemagne warns Holly that she's going to die, and warns her about Gideon (in CatCT he even calls him a "murderer"). That's why he's so anxious about Jesse's association with the "hard" boys (like Gideon [Knuckles, SN, etc.]) in the harbor bars (like the metal bar [SPayne]); see HJ, CSongs, etc. That association was the path that led to Holly's death, and he's determined to keep Jesse off it.
So when Charlemagne says "I serve my purpose" [BCig], this is what he's talking about. Whatever else he's doing or not doing, he's sticking around to keep Jesse away from that scene. (I recall reading that Craig took some shit for this line, just like he did for Wait a While, but again, it's Charlemagne's line, and any "paternalistic" quality in it is a front for his guilty, anxious, fucked-up bundle of complexes about the past.) It's a pretty messed up way to deal with the situation, and Charlemagne doesn't come off looking too good here, particularly when he can't resist the opportunity to start dealing from the restaurant, with the result that he himself ends up bringing Skin trouble down on Jesse (as described in Criminal Fingers). But it's a pretty human reaction, and believable.
With that, we're ready to take a closer look at Hornets! Hornets!
Like We Can Get Together, HH is a song about Charlemagne and Jesse, holed up in her bedroom and listening to her records. The POV character of the song is Charlemagne. He's hanging with Jesse but remembering Holly, contrasting Jesse's innocence with the heavy stuff he's seen in the past.
She said always remember never to trust me She said that the first night that she met me She said there's gonna come a time when I'm gonna have to go With whoever's gonna get me the highest
Set off from what follows by the silence of the band, this is Charlemagne remembering Holly & her prophetic warning, on the first night that he met her, that one day she'd have to go with whoever would get her the highest (as she did when she left her party with Gideon). Again, Holly's not about love or sex; Holly's about getting high, and always has been.
She said I won't be much for conversation If we go and do the rest of this [liner] She said / [sung] And I've never been much for conservation I kinda dig these awkward silences
The music starts, and now we're in the Act III present, some time in the 2000's. We just looked at the meaning of the first verse yesterday, but didn't mention that it's Jesse who's speaking these lines, not Holly. Charlemagne hears her say something that Holly used to say; she says it in all innocence, but the echo of Holly's "awkward silences" [BCamp], with the implication of "I'm gonna have to go," make his blood run cold. (We know that Jesse really does have Holly's tendency to stop talking as she gets high; see "we power down and try to socialize" [BCig].)
She's got those Bones Brigade videos She knew them back and forth, she slept with so many skaters She had the place to herself, she had a couple hundred bucks And he had nothing but the [sung] number / [liner] numbers
Charlemagne's with Jesse in her bedroom; looking around he sees the Bones Brigade videos on the shelf, relics of the way she throws herself into whatever her boyfriends are into ("guys let me cover this" [40B], "she used to feel so stupid when they'd talk about the music" [JaJ]).
(I'd just like to say that the Bones Brigade line is a really nice touch; once again, a crapload of information in a really elegant thumbnail. And the conversation/conservation thing, clever as hell but packed with significance the whole way through. Not everyone can write like this.)
Jesse had a couple hundred bucks from her waitressing job [HJ, 40B], and the house where she lives, in St. Paul [AHfA, CF, WCGT, Smidge], to herself; Charlemagne had shit, but he did have the number of a dealer (or, in the liner notes version, dealers). So they stopped by some house in suburban Minneapolis (see below) to buy some, and are now getting high together. (This is maybe the best example of Charlemagne's similarity to Christ in being maintained by women [Luke 8:2-3]).
[liner] She said / I like the guy who always answers the door He always knows what you came to his house for
As she's getting stoned, Jesse comments brightly that she likes the guy who always answers the door at the dealer's place --- he always knows what you came to his house for! Charlemagne hears the innocence, and is hit hard by it: she has no idea what the dealer scene can lead to. Everything's reminding him of Holly.
She said I won't be much for all this Humbert Humbert stuff I've never really done that much of this And I have to really try so hard not to fall in love I have to concentrate when we kiss
Again with the perfect symmetries: verses 2-4 were about the shadow of Holly's drug addiction on Jesse's words; verses 5-7 are about the shadow of her prostitution on the same.
Jesse warns him that she won't be much for fooling around with a much older man (like Humbert Humbert in Nabokov's Lolita) either, that she's never done really that much of this (which, like "she doesn't really do it much" in 40 Bucks, is essentially a lie; she might not have been fucking other older men, but she's been getting with him plenty [YLHF, BCig]).
But they kiss, like they usually do [HJ, Magazines]; Charlemagne has to concentrate to avoid falling in love, but he does his best to keep it together. For one, he has a purpose to serve [BCig], to keep Jesse from following Holly's path. For two, he's in love with Mary.
We realize now why he keeps obsessing about kissing Jesse, at the same time that he assumes zero cognitive responsibility for the sex in their relationship ["Damn right you'll rise again" [YLHF], "She pulls me into experiments" [BCig], "This little tryst is hard to quit" [BCig]): it's because that's what he used to do with Holly. Holly and Charlemagne never had sex [Swish, HaRRF], but they kissed a lot, in the theaters and elsewhere. This is a fact that becomes important later on.
She mouthed the words along to "Running Up That Hill" That song got scratched into her soul And he never heard that song before but he still got the metaphor He knows some people that switched places before
Jesse mouths the words along from "Running Up That Hill" about switching places; Charlemagne doesn't know the song (if Jesse's comment in Criminal Fingers is to be taken literally, he likes punk-label Revelation songs), but again the line reminds him of Holly, how she left him to end up with Gideon, and Mary left Gideon to end up with him [MM, SG, etc.].
They're listening to records; Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" is played, one of the songs that "got scratched into her soul" [CSongs]; this is a clear confirmation that "she" is Jesse, and that this is one of Charlemagne's visits "to her cabin" "on Heaven Hill," where they "lock your bedroom door and listen to your records" [WCGT].
[liner] She said / I like the crowds at the really big shows People touching people that they don't even know, yo
Jesse remarks, again in total innocence, that she likes the crowds at the really big shows, where even strangers touch each other; it's another dark moment for Charlemagne, remembering how Holly turned tricks under the stands at stadium shows to feed her habit [C&N, etc.].
I guess the heavy stuff ain't quite at its heaviest By the time it gets out to suburban Minneapolis We were living up at Nicollet and 66th With three skaters and some hoodrat chick
Charlemagne reflects that this suburban Minneapolis stuff must not be all that heavy; Jesse's high, but she's still talking. And that goes for the difference between things back then with Holly, and the present with Jesse, too. Tripping isn't hard drugs, and being a hoodrat isn't prostitution. He just has to stay on top of the situation and warn her off anything worse ("tripping is for teenagers, hard drugs are for murderers / the bartender's friends" [CSongs, CatCT]; "22 and banging around in restaurants / isn't that much prettier than banging around in bars" [HJ, MINTS]).
But then, even out in suburban Minneapolis it can get really heavy. He remembers how he, Mary, the Narrator, and Gideon --- themselves just a hoodrat and skaters in their 20's --- were living together at Nicollet and 66th at the time the metal bar incident went down. And then, a cryptic refernece to another suburban MPLS episode, or possibly two:
Drove the wrong way down 169 Almost died up by Edina High
There's a timeframe jump here; "Drove the wrong way down 169" refers to something that happens later, as does "Almost died up by Edina High" (whether that refers to the 169 incident, or to something separate).
The context is provided by the title "Hornets! Hornets!," which comes from the cheer for Edina High sports teams. Like wasps, spiders, bugs throughout, it's a reference to the Skins, and associates them with the deadly suburban heaviness that Charlemagne is remembering.
"Drove the wrong way down 169" is the second event alluded to by "Speed shooters driving 'round and coming down and trying to hook up with an [song] entrance / [liner notes] exit ramp" [CiS]. We'll get there.
"Almost died up by Edina High" could refer to the "almost died" drive. But it could also refer to a late street fight in the Indian Fringes (the same fight where cowboy Shepard ended up with "blood on his boots and an arrow in his hat" [LA]), if indeed the Indian Fringes are that warren of streets that connect Edina High with the frontage roads along 169. The idea is so ludicrous --- that's some swank suburban living up there --- that I can't propose it seriously, but it's not like the Cowboys/Indians theme isn't insane already, and it perfectly ties up a bunch of things late in the story. You can judge for yourself when we get that far, or take a look in the meantime at Edina on Google Maps and see Cherokee Trail, Indian Hills Pass, Navaho Trail, Arrowhead Lake, Blackfoot Pass, Cheyenne Trail, Dakota Trail, Iroquois Trail, Mohawk Trail, Indianhead Lake, Paiute Pass, Apache Road, Pawnee Road, Shawnee Circle, Comanche Court, Sioux Trail, all between Edina High and 169.
More tomorrow. Thank you, sincerely, for reading along, and for any and all prayers you can spare for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 3, 2016 23:43:58 GMT -5
I changed my mind about finishing the geography --- I'm just going to talk about Holly and Gideon with the evidence that's available now, and leave the rest of it for later. There's no way to get to all the evidence without covering a bunch of things out of story order, and it's not worth the extra confusion. We'll get there soon enough. There are two major sources for what happens after the party: Stevie Nix and Banging Camp. Stevie Nix is easy so let's deal with that first: I was keyed up, keys jangled in the stalls They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls And the carpet at the Thunderbird Has a burn for every cowboy that got fenced in This is pretty straightforward. Like the dealer in Southtown Girls, the Skins sold their wares in the malls during the day, and counted up the money in the motels in the evening (compare "Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up" [SS]). Holly's party was in July 1996; for the rest of that year and the winter of 1996-97, Gideon was out with them, traveling between malls and motels, accompanied by Holly. She got high in bathroom stalls, and fucked Gideon in the motels by way of trade; a bleak life, with little trace of the "sweet fleeting feeling" [CSunrise, CiS] of old "Cheyenne." Gideon and the cowboys have been fenced in. This went on until the spring (1997). To find out what happened then, we have to turn to Banging Camp. I would say that, of all the songs, Banging Camp is the most difficult. A lot of that has to do with when and how it's told. But rather than try to explain the whole thing now, I'm just going to review the story that it tells about Holly and Gideon at the riverbank that spring. Yeah, there's camps down by the banks of the river And it's sketchy in the night but they mostly lay low in the light Hey sweet recovery, come on, won't you wade into the water with me? You know, there's camps down by the banks of the river The first two lines set the scene near the camps down in the sketchy area of St. Paul, by the banks of the river near the harbor. Then the voice of Gideon is heard: "Hey sweet recovery" is a gangster-style greeting, like "Hey Bloomington" in Southtown Girls. He's talking to Holly; his meaning in calling her "recovery" is ambiguous, but we'll find out what he means in a moment. He invites her to "wade into the water" with him, with the implication that he's going to baptize her. (Like the Narrator lighting candles [LID], Mary praying for indulgences [BCrosses], and Holly skipping CCD [CiS], Gideon was raised Catholic; we remember his lecturing Mary about not having the patience for Jesus, before initiating her into speed shooting in A Slight Discomfort.) After a few intervening verses, the POV character continues: I saw him at the riverbank He was breaking bread and giving thanks With crosses made of pipes and planks Leaned up against the nitrous tanks The "he" in this description is again Gideon, who is now seen holding Mass. See the definition of "Mass" from wikipedia ( link): The origin of the Eucharist is the Lord's Supper, and the line "breaking bread and giving thanks" comes from the gospels' description of this event [Matthew 26:26-28]: The description of Gideon continues: And he said take a hit Hold your breath and I'll dunk your head Then when you wake up again Yeah, you'll be high as hell and born again Here Gideon offers Holly another sacrament, the sacrament of Baptism: he promises her that, if she takes a hit of nitrous and holds her breath, he'll dunk her head, and she'll wake up high as hell and born again. We're left to fill in the blanks after that. But there are clues earlier in the song that point us to what happened: She said I dig those awkward silences 'Cause I grew up in denial and went to school in Massachusetts He said Hi, I like to party on the problem blocks And I can't stand it when the banging stops The first two lines are the voice of Holly; the second two are the voice of Gideon (note again the "Hi," like "Hey sweet recovery"). In the symmetry of these lines, a key opposition is expressed: Holly likes awkward silences; Gideon likes the *opposite* of awkward silences, namely banging. At first blush, this is an odd set of statements. But it isn't just about silence versus noise; both "awkward silences" and "banging" bring along additional implications. We have the evidence of Hurricane J to tell us that "banging" means "fucking." And we have the evidence of Hornets! Hornets! to tell us what "awkward silences" means: She said I won't be much for conversation If we go and do the rest of this And I've never been much for conservation ["She said" in the liner notes confirm that this is all one speech] I kinda dig these awkward silences "I've never been much for conservation" means "yes, we *should* go and do all the rest of this (rather than save some for later), even though I won't be much for talking afterward," since after all "I kinda dig these awkward silences." We understand from this that the complete sense of "awkward silences" is "super-high-and-withdrawn silences." This is critical. We know that Mary likes to get high and fuck, but that's not Holly at all. Holly likes to get high and retreat into silence. There's lots of evidence for this, now that we know what to look for. We already know that Holly never pursued sex for pleasure, only as a means of earning money for drugs ("She said I've laid beneath my lovers but I've never gotten laid" [HaRRF]); but now we understand why there's so much emphasis on the fact that she has to force herself to make noise while fucking. There's "Holly can't speak" in Barfruit Blues, talking about her prostitution: Holly can't speak, she don't feel all that sweet About the places she sometimes has to go to get some sleep And "wired for sound" in Cattle and the Creeping Things, with specific reference to Holly and Gideon together after her party: You on the streets with a tendency to preach to the choir, wired for sound and down with whatever I heard Gideon did you in Denver And "hard fast noises" in Girls Like Status, also with reference to Gideon/Holly's looks-for-"status" (high) exchange: She said that she was coming but she mostly just made hard fast noises It kind of sounded like The Locust But this is a problem, because *Gideon* likes to get high and fuck, with a lot of noise. And he's her lover, with strings attached, as the final lines of Banging Camp ominously remind us: Yeah, there's strings attached to every single lover There's strings attached to every single lover We have enough to put together the pieces now. At some point, being unhappy with the "fenced in" life of malls and motels, Gideon "got off the grid" [MoC] with Holly and went down to the camps by the banks of the river (in apparent analogy to John the Baptist, the voice crying in the wilderness along the river Jordan, who baptized with the Holy Ghost [Mark 1:1-8]). But in doing so, he ceased to be a reliable supplier for Holly ("She spent half last winter just trying to get paid / From some guy she originally thought to be her savior" [HaRRF]). She in turn withdrew her availability for sex, claiming to be done with their deal ("sweet recovery"). But Gideon "can't stand it when the banging stops" [BCamp]. So he invited her to "wade into the water" with him, and told her he'd get her "high as hell and born again." And then he drowned her. We know that something funny happened here; we have several lines that appear to come from later in Holly's story, and we have her own testimony in Stevie Nix to the effect that I was half dead then I got born again I got lost in all the lights but it was okay in the end But Gideon really did drown her. And place name "Sacramento" refers to the sacrament of Eucharist/Baptism in which Holly was killed. That's enough for today. Please think of Still Alive Carl if you have a moment, and thank you for reading along this far.
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