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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 2, 2016 23:42:43 GMT -5
There's only one more thing to cover in Act II, namely "what happened to Gideon and Holly after her party." And to explain that, we need to wrap up the rest of the THS geography. We've talked about city/state metaphors. "Dallas" (the state of lurking violence) is a little different than "Denver" (state of being high), "Los Angeles" (state of making it big), and "Hostile, Massachusetts" (state of hostility) in that it's not just an abstract state; because that violence went down in a particular place, "Dallas" is also used to refer to that same place --- namely, the metal bar, or more generally, the killer parties area of St. Paul. Like "Dallas," there are other city/state names that map to physical locations in the Twin Cities. In the abstract, "Ybor City" is the state of wild party insanity; but the place where this insanity comes to life is, again, the killer parties area of St. Paul. This is made explicit in Most People Are DJs: Well, hold steady Ybor City ... It's going down right now in Lowertown Ybor City is in Lowertown, which is adjacent to the southern end of Payne Avenue (metal bar) and to the railroad yard (the Skins' destination in Look Alive). This nexus of sketchy places is always referred to as "down" there, at the opposite end of Lake Street from Uptown: - "down to the taverns" [OwtB] - "down to the railroad yard" [LA] - "down to Ybor City" [SA] - "down in Lowertown" [MoC] - "down by Selby and Griggs" [YGD] - "went down with some crust punk junk and woke up with a straight edge band" [BBlues] - "bloodshed down below" [GoaH] In the 2005 MAGNET interview, Craig explicitly confirms that the geography of the story is structured in this way ( link): Texas --------- Which brings us back around to "Texas." In the same way that "Los Angeles" and "California" have the same meaning in the story, "Texas" and "Dallas" refer to the same place. This is why (see "down in Lowertown" etc. above) The Only Thing describes Mary's time "pretty much living in" the Ambassador (i.e. the metal bar) as being "down in Texas": First she's down in Texas. Then she went back to Tennessee. Tennessee ---------------- So if, after being down in Texas, Mary went back to Tennessee, what does "Tennessee" mean? From The Sweet Part of the City, we know that Mary "always claimed that she was from Tennessee"; and in Sequestered in Memphis, the contrast of "Texas" with "Tennessee" is described more narrowly as the contrast of "Texas" with "Memphis." We don't need more than that to guess that "Tennessee/Memphis" is so named because it's "Graceland," the state of grace, home of "Mary, full of grace" [BCrosses]. It's possible that Mary is in fact physically from Tennessee as well; in Our Whole Lives, the Narrator is under the impression that she moved to the Twin Cities from elsewhere ("you finally stopped talking about that boy back home" [OWL]). But it could also be that he's confused by her "weird-talking" description of these things, just as Charlemagne is later imagined as believing that "Cheyenne" refers to the actual city [YS]. (More to say about "Memphis," and what happens there, in Act III.) Houston ------------- Beverly Hills and Modesto are in Calfiornia, but in the THS universe they have different metaphoric meanings. "Houston" too is different from "Texas." We've already suggested that Runners High is told from Gideon's POV, when he's come back to himself, years after getting jumped in. The line that describes his return to sanity is the following: When I came to in Houston. Why "Houston"? The answer is given by The Ambassador: A Bay City tire shop. It's just a temporary stop. A touchdown on a trip that was mostly undefined. "Houston" is "touchdown" country; like the Apollo missions etc., it's where Gideon made contact again with Earth. Bay City ---------- So "Houston" is the same place as "Bay City," where Gideon was living and working at some point after his departure [SPayne, Ambassador]. "Bay City" is the name of this place as tire shop, maybe because of the auto bays, but more likely in homage to the Bay City "Rollers," where rollers=tires. (The first album Craig owned was a Bay City Rollers album; he talks about them in a few interviews.) (There will be more to say about "Bay City" too in Act III.) Virginia ---------- While talking about The Swish, we forgot to mention "Newport News": We spent the night last night in Newport News Holly's statement that she and Charlemagne were in "Newport News" is the same as saying that they were in "Virginia"; compare Killer Parties: And we found out Virginia really is for the lovers "Virginia" is the state of virginal love; Holly and Charlemagne (16-going-on-17 and 23 at that time) weren't in a sexual relationship ("They made a movie about me and you / They made it half nude and half true" [Swish]; see also "She said I've laid beneath my lovers but I've never gotten laid" [HaRRF]). Thanks as always for reading, and for sparing a thought for Still Alive Carl, if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Feb 1, 2016 19:20:27 GMT -5
I want to pick up some city/state metaphors that I deliberately skipped past last week, and I'll start with one that made me spit coffee, namely Dallas. (Some of these ahas are really, really funny. There's a line in Runners High that I just got for the first time today; I made heads turn in the office when I laughed. I don't think I'm doing justice to that, but I want to try, at least.)
Let me back into this for a minute by talking about "the play within the play" (the idea of a story told inside the main one that reflects on the main story itself).
Craig riffs on this idea a lot. We see it first in The Swish, with
They made a movie about me and you They made it half nude and half true
where we're given to understand that Holly is seeing her own and Charlemagne's story reflected in a movie that they're watching. There are others, too. Almost Everything has something that certainly looks like one:
Went to some movie. It was loud dumb and bloody. The third act took place in a wormhole. The hero ascended to heaven. Then we headed home.
We can guess that "The hero ascended to heaven" might have something to do with Charlemagne's crucifixion, and "loud dumb and bloody" fits what we know of it from Both Crosses too. The "wormhole" has to wait for later. But "the third act" is where I got "Act I" and "Act II" for the timeline. (I don't actually know whether this division into 3+ acts is supposed to be applied just to the events of the crucifixion, or to the whole story; but it fits the overall story easily, so I'm going to run with that for now.)
Here's what I really wanted to get to: Holly's porn films. We're told about two of them, a parody of North Dallas Forty, and another of Revenge of the Nerds:
She did a movie called North Dallas Foursome There was agony and ecstasy and the cheerleaders got gruesome
She did a movie called Revenge of The Pervs There were screams and jeans and curves and nerves
Holly really did get into porn, but these lines are pulling a second line of duty as plays-within-the-play. Just like that couplet in The Weekenders,
I remember the metal bar I remember the reservoir
these two films allude symmetrically to (1) the beatdown and (2) the crucifixion. We're getting ahead of ourselves matching up "loud dumb and bloody" [AE] with "Revenge" and "screams" for #2, but it's easy to see the metal bar beatdown in the first movie:
- "foursome": the four who were present: the Narrator, Charlemagne, Gideon, and Mary - "agony": Charlemagne getting beat to shit - "ecstasy": Mary in ecstasy seeing her Christ being scourged, having sex - "cheerleaders got gruesome": Mary bleeding from stigmata on the bed - football metaphor: as we've noted, the beatdown is repeatedly described as a stadium event, with the Skins "running up the score" on Charlemagne, and the crowd going wild "pointing at the scoreboard" [C&N, BBreathing, IHTWTDFY]
And presto, there's the "Dallas" metaphor: the Skins as violent thugs prone to "running up the score" are the "Dallas Cowboys." (This is the second Skins-as-cowboys motif, totally separate from the cowboys/indians metaphor associated with "Cheyenne," which was already completely unhinged in its own right.) I laughed. Go Vikes!
This reading is further confirmed by Don't Let Me Explode:
And we didn't go to Dallas 'Cause Jackie Onassis said that it ain't safe for Catholics yet Think about what they pulled on Kennedy and then think about his security Then think about what they might try to pull on you and me
Here, Holly is being questioned about her movements with Gideon after they left her party ("We scored big in Denver and thought it might be best" etc.). Los Angeles? Referring to their "big-time" dreams, she says "We never made it." New Orleans? Referring to her earlier experience in porn, she says "We were trying to stay away from those kind of scenes."
And then she denies going to "Dallas," which is to say that she denies going back to the land of lurking violence on Payne Avenue. "Jackie Onassis" is "Jack," i.e. Gideon [Swish, HM], warning that they shouldn't go there: "look at what they did to Kennedy" --- to Charlemagne --- "and think about what they might do to you and me."
The "think about his security" quip turns on Charlemagne's status as Christ, who suffered scourging and crucifixion despite having legions of angels at his command [Matthew 4:6]:
And, before the crucifixion, when Peter cut off the servant's ear to defend Christ in the garden [Matthew 26:53]:
Both these Biblical passages are referred to elsewhere in the songs. The first is spoken by the Devil, when he takes Jesus up to the pinnacle of the Temple and tempts him to throw himself down; we recognize this behind "The Devil and John Berryman, they took a walk together / And they ended up on Washington talking to the river ... There was that night that we thought John Berryman could fly" [SBS]. And the second one comes back in the context of the crucifixion. But I want to hold off opening that can of worms for a while longer.
More tomorrow. Thanks for sticking with this so far, and for your thoughts for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 31, 2016 21:53:20 GMT -5
Last week just about did me in. For the next few days I'm going to bite off smaller chunks, hopefully with the timeline out there it'll feel like clearer progress is being made.
The next we see of Charlemagne after Holly's party is in Southtown Girls. Charlemagne is the POV character of the song; needing to find a new source after the metal bar beatdown (which itself came after the Skins had "cut off supplies" [OwtB]), he takes the lead on a deal that, after a lot of runaround, eventually goes down at the Southtown Shopping Center not far from Nicollet & 66th.
From
I'm a little bit surprised, you didn't tell me there'd be three of you
we know that he's accompanied by two people. Gideon and Holly disappeared after her party; the only two left are Mary and the Narrator. Mary comes along because she means to put herself front and center now that Holly's out of the way (it's also her car). The Narrator comes along because of Mary. She's going a bad road, and he's going to follow her all the way down.
The whole fourth verse is just a stunning bit of writing, with a huge amount of information packed into a totally lifelike thumbnail in a tiny space:
Don't look me in the eye, look over at the theater I'm a little bit surprised, you didn't tell me there'd be three of you Hey Bloomington, what'd you let them do to you? Now I think they're almost through with you
The dealer gives them orders, showing them who has the upper hand. Even their unannounced arrival with three times his numbers doesn't faze him. Charlemagne is still making rookie mistakes, showing how much of fuckup he is. He shows clear signs of having been beat within an inch of his life, and at this rate, the dealer predicts, it won't be long before he gets properly killed. (Even "Hey Bloomington" is doing double and maybe triple duty: the Southtown Shopping Center is located in Bloomington, Minnesota; it's likely that there's a deliberate echo of Bloomington, Indiana there to go with "Quarry" in his foreshadowing of the crucifixion and the One for the Cutters framing; and it lets us know something about how to read "Hey Providence" in Same Kooks.) Not too shabby.
Anyway, Mary's plan works:
Southtown girls won't blow you away But you know that they'll stay Southtown girls won't blow you away But you know that they'll stay
Charlemagne is looking at Mary, thinking about the fact that she's with him down at the Southtown Shopping Center, sticking with him in the midst of a really bad situation after Holly's abandoned him. She's no Holly; she's not going to blow you away; but you know that she'll stay. From these small beginnings, Charlemagne begins to fall in love with Mary.
In the rush of getting through to the timeline last week, I forgot a few things along the way, which I want to add in before we get too much further:
- The identification of Mary with the "white-winged dove" of Stevie Nicks' Edge of Seventeen (in Stevie Nix) has a point: the voice of the dove is heard in the morning and again at nightfall saying "come away, come away," which is what Mary is saying to Holly.
- "All-ages hardcore matinee shows" in Massive Nights is a long double entendre. On the one hand it refers to actual all-ages hardcore shows at 7th Street Entry / First Ave (and maybe there really were matinees). On the other it refers to the "hardcore" sexual encounter of Mary and the Narrator at prom, "all-ages" because he's still 17, and "matinee shows" because she's watching her "film" vision of Charlemagne the whole time. Good stuff.
- When identifying Sapphire with Mary, I should have mentioned the Narrator's description of Mary as "giving off blue light" in Our Whole Lives.
That'll do. Thank you for reading along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 30, 2016 23:34:54 GMT -5
Timeline time. (This was very useful, I should have done it before.) A few things: 1) Committing to a timeline with dates ups the chances that an oversight on my part will make its way into black and white. If (when) that happens, I'll come back and edit this post, with a record of edits. I also plan to add to some things later on when we've established a few more details, and I'll make note of those as well. I mean for this to serve as a clear account of the story so far, and as a reference document. 2) The various anchor dates we're given all fit together neatly, provided the Teenage Liberation numbers aren't read as actual ages indexed to events (in the same way that the events from the story alluded to in Positive Jam didn't actually happen in the 1920's, 1930's, etc.), and that's the assumption I'm going with. I'll write up a discussion of the dates and the math later. 3) The goal is clarity, so I'm shooting for completeness. That means I'm going to toss in a few early events or dates that I haven't made an argument for yet, and will mark those with an asterisk for the time being. Update: after the rest of the breakdown, the timeline continues here ( link). PREHISTORYSep 1970 - Sep 1971Mary, Charlemagne, Gideon and the Narrator are born.* (see notes on timeline below) July 1977
Holly is born.* (see notes on timeline below) Jun 1981 - Jun 1982Jesse is born.* (see notes on timeline below) ACT I - High School (1980 dates) Before summer 1988
Mary gets screwed up by religion, screwed by soccer players [SN, ASD]. Summer 1988
Mary got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the river [SN], had her first vision of Charlemagne-Christ (being crucified) and fell in love [R&T, HM]. Stigmata appear on her hands. The Narrator sees a Youth of Today show at 7th Street Entry Sunday Night Dance Party. He gets almost killed by skins in the pit [PJ, BBreathing]. He also meets Gideon* [CSTLN]. The Narrator, looking to buy, gets knocked off his bicycle down by Selby and Griggs, and gets 10 bucks & his tennis shoes stolen [YGD]. The Narrator, looking to buy (invited by Gideon [ASD]?), goes to a party at the Party Pit, and meets Mary, who's there with the townies [PP, ASD]. Jesse takes up smoking [BCig]. Spring 1989
The Narrator and Mary go to prom together; they have a massive night, but the presence of Charlemagne in vision interferes, sending them off on separate trips [MN, OWL, YGD, PP]. Summer 1989
Gideon, a townie but not a Skin yet, moves in to pick up Mary, and introduces her to speed shooting [ASD]. The Narrator goes to a Shelter show at 7th Street Entry Sunday Night Dance Party. He gets a Hare Krishna pamphlet and an mystic message of non-violence from lead singer Ray Cappo [BBreathing]. Fall 1989
The Narrator goes away to school in Boston [PP]. Mary stuck around the Twin Cities for school, staying where the townies are [PP]; she lives with other girls & gets good grades, but continues to frequent Gideon and the Party Pit in secret [OftC]. ACT II - 1990 dates; Nicollet & 66th Spring 1993The Narrator graduates and returns to the Twin Cities to start a band [PP]. Fall 1993 Holly, 16 years old and with a developing love of getting high, skips CCD to go look for something for a party, and meets Charlemagne, 22, dealing on the corner [CiS]. Charlemagne takes her under his wing and insists that they flee the mean streets of Lynn together. Holly mentions that she has a nice cousin from a good family who just graduated college in Minneapolis [Swish, BBlues, MINTS, CiS, SN, OftC, analogy to SM, etc.]. She also said, always remember never to trust me; there's gonna come a time when I'm gonna have to go with whoever's gonna get me the highest [HH]. (See notes on timeline below.) The "first night" party takes place in an Uptown bar. Mary and Gideon are there [Swish]. The Narrator's band is playing; he sees Mary for the first time since high school [BBlues]. Holly, just arrived from Lynn with Charlemagne in tow, enters and is greeted with a kiss by cousin Mary, whose stigmata have begun bleeding at the sight of her Christ in the flesh [Swish, BBlues]. At some point Mary tells Charlemagne that she has to talk to him, but then doesn't say anything [MINTS]. At the end of the party, Mary proposes that the five of them get a house together; the Narrator has to choose whether to get back into Mary's life and lose, or to run, but in the end decides to go with them [BBlues]. The five kids move into a house at Nicollet & 66th [HH, C&N]; Gideon lives in the loft, the other four on the ground floor [SN]. Mary calls the boys the Holy Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost [A&H]. Summer 1994Holly's first summer in Minneapolis (the "blockbuster" summer). She and Charlemagne spend the summer in the theaters; she turns 17 in late July, he's 23, their relationship is chaste [Swish]. They're supported by Mary ("moving pictures"), who, as Charlemagne will later learn, can use her visions of the future to make easy money at the racetrack/OTB [CA, Weekenders]. Fall 1994After September [Swish], Charlemagne, dreaming of the big time, makes contact with the meth cooker Skins and sets up as a dealer. Holly's drug use becomes more serious, moving steadily along the spectrum from enthralled toward enslaved [CiS, implicit from later developments in Swish, C&N, CatCT, etc.]. Spring 1995Charlemagne hasn't been dealing long before he fucks up, and, with the cops at the door, has to put the drugs down the drain. He's left owing the Skins $7K [YGD]. Charlemagne turns to Holly (who for her part wants the flow of drugs to continue [BBlues]) to bail him out; she begins turning tricks [YGD, BBlues, Swish]. Summer 1995Holly's second summer in Minneapolis (the "cocksucking" summer). Charlemagne takes her earnings and pays her back in drugs, but is increasingly unreliable about his half of the bargain [Swish, C&N, MINTS, MM]. In the meantime she's blowing gangsters in the declining City Center, and gets herpes [Swish, PJ]. In late July, Holly turns 18. She gets a call inviting her to come out to California to be in films, and goes [C&N, MINTS]. She leaves Charlemagne with 50 bucks, a business that is now plainly failing, and a debt to the Skins that still has to be repaid [MINTS, OwtB]. With Holly gone, they're now four in the house at Nicollet & 66th [HH]. Winter 1995Holly spends the winter in California making porn [C&N, MINTS, CiS]. The Skins cut off supplies and send over some guys with a message for Charlemagne about the debt [OwtB]. Charlemagne pulls street corner scams [FN], trying to dig out of the hole he's in, but doesn't make headway. Spring 1996 Holly comes back to Minneapolis, to a house in the same neighborhood [MINTS] with an old landlady [CatCT], and goes back to turning tricks [C&N]. Summer 1996In a short space of time [CSunrise, OwtB] in or around July, a series of things happen. Mary comes home after a night of drugs and sex to a confrontation with the Narrator about what she's doing [CSunrise]. Both he and she have become increasingly drug-addicted over time [SM, CSunrise]. She predicts the metal bar beatdown at their next party [CSunrise, Weekenders]. Charlemagne's increasingly dire financial straits result in the phone getting disconnected [OwtB]. The Narrator, Charlemagne, Gideon and Mary go down to the metal bar in St. Paul; the phone's a problem, and Charlemagne wants to make an impression on the Skins [OwtB, SPayne, etc.]. The kids get a dose of meth [SPayne, SM], Charlemagne gets almost killed [SPayne, KP, SG, etc.], the Narrator is beaten [SPayne, BBlues], Gideon gets jumped in to the gang [YGD, SPayne, SN], and Mary launches into a raunchy new arc of meth abuse, stigmatic bleeding, and Skin-fucking [SPayne, OftC, Ambassador, 212M]. The Narrator gets Charlemagne to the hospital [implicit in SPayne, SN, RH, etc.] and calls Holly, who comes to the ER to see him [SN]. Charlemagne reproaches her for not having been by his side when it happened [BBreathing]. Gideon shows up, newly jumped in; Holly sees his new status, and resolves to make him share his new supply of drugs with her [SN]. In late July, Holly turns 19 and throws a party [MM, HF, SN, Weekenders]. Mary shows up with a plan to get Holly out of the way: she's going to pair off Holly's need for drugs with Gideon's need for sex [SN, CiS, Weekenders, etc.], and so kill two birds with one stone. Charlemagne, sitting in the corner with a milkcrate on his head, sees what's going down, and predicts that Holly's going to die [HF]. Mary stops to ask him how he likes the big time now [HF]. Her plan succeeds; Holly blows Gideon, tries meth for the first time, and the two of them leave together [MM, MoC]. Almost, but not quite, done with Act II here. Update: after the rest of the breakdown, the timeline continues here ( link). Thanks for reading. If this is at all enlightening or fun, and you can take a moment out of that to frame a thought or a prayer for my friend Still Alive Carl, I would be very grateful. NOTES ON TIMELINE -------------------- Some evidence below isn't covered until later in the thread (spoiler alert); but the timeline arguments ought to be in one place. The essential evidence for Mary, Charlemagne, Gideon and the Narrator being born between Sep 1970-Sep 1971 is as follows. From the combination of SN and R&T, we know that Mary was 17 [SN] in 1988 [R&T]. We know that Gideon was 17 at same time as Mary [YLHF]. We know that Mary and Narrator were at prom together [MN, YGD, OWL] and headed off for college at the same time [PP]. Finally, we're told that Mary was 33 at the time she died [SN] in the same crucifixion that involved Charlemagne and Gideon; if Charlemagne, the most overtly Christ-like of all of them, was 33 at the same time as the others, that gives him a birthday in the same year as well. We know that Holly was born in July 1977 because she was named for the storm during which she was conceived [HJ]; Hurricane Holly hit on October 22, 1976. The evidence that Jesse is born between Jun 1981-Jun 1982 is that she's 22 years old as summer 2004 approaches [HJ]. The evidence for placing Holly and Charlemagne's first meeting in Fall 1993 is threefold: - CCD is in session and there's a party later, but it's dark already [CiS]; it's not summer. - Holly being 16 and running away with a 22-year-old Charlemagne is plausible; 15, not so much. - Holly and Charlemagne have to get to MLPS with a summer ahead of them. EDITS ------ Added OftC as evidence for Mary's good family, C&N for all five kids at Nicollet & 66th Added note about Mary supporting Charlemagne and Holly through summer 1994 Added links to the continuation of the timeline later in this thread Added refs for the asterisked items above Moved range for Jesse's birth from Mar 1981-Mar 1982 to Jun 1981-Jun 1982, having decided to take "summer" [SS, JaJ, BBreathing, CSummer] as the literal date of the crucifixion and "Easter" [BCrosses, HaRRF] as the metaphoric date, not the other way around Added NOTES ON TIMELINE at bottom of page, and references to same in timeline. Added note about Jesse taking up smoking :-) Added note about 'always remember never to trust me'
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 29, 2016 22:25:54 GMT -5
No, this is great, I don't mind the questions, and besides I'm certain I've screwed up at least a few things (see an example with "Barry White" below). I mean, I'm sure about the big picture, but the big picture's made out of little pictures. The details matter. One thing I will say is that if you extrapolate from various things I've said, you're going to find a number of apparent contradictions not too much further out. Craig has dropped row after row of landmines in this thing, all of which have to be defused. I'm trying to step up the pace because I want to get to them with an explanation soon, before folks reading do. (Plus I underestimated the amount of writing needed for this by like an order of magnitude, and I can see that this is getting hard to follow.) Anyway, to the points you raise: 1) I think Mary's "business" is literally just getting high and having sex; that's "her business" in the general sense, not a business for profit ("she don't have to work" [CA]). The line is constructed to make it appear that she's hooking, and for a long time I thought that's what she was doing, but that's a trap set by Craig. (Among other things, it helps to conceal the true backstory in high school, and to create the impression that Charlemagne is her pimp later on, which he isn't.) If I try to put a very precise construction on it, I would say this. Mary wants Charlemagne, but there's an obstacle there, even beyond the fact that he's still in love with Holly at this point (in CatCT we see that he's still passing by Holly's house after her return from Hollywood). Under the circumstances, for Mary, getting high and fucking while experiencing him in her vision is the next best thing. Charlemagne looks like a townie in her vision --- why, we can't say yet, but there's the Jimmy Connors thing we mentioned [ABlues]; you might also ask when exactly the kind of guy who would wear a purple suit, who rolls with a "knockoff necktie" [HM], would switch to sweatpants --- and so in the Cheyenne Sunrise timeframe she's out looking for townies to get high and fuck with. Now I'm probably putting way too fine a point on it, but this is before the metal bar, too; once she's found the metal bar, then she doesn't even have to go out looking around, she can just go to the club. See The Ambassador: 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. ... There was blood on the bed And the lights in their eyes. 2) In Curves and Nerves, when Mary says "these hoodrat chicks," she's definitely talking about Holly --- Charlemagne didn't fit Holly's plans; she left, and in leaving cut him pretty deep. But even though the plural can be read as applying just to Holly, I suspect Mary *is* also referring to herself. I'll address this further down since it ties in with what's happening behind the scenes at Holly's party. A very important thing to clear up, though, is that HaRRF calls Holly "a" hoodrat, not "the" hoodrat (and, again, it's the unreliable Narrator speaking there; while not exactly lying in that particular line, he's sure as hell not telling the whole truth. You might have a look at the Separation Sunday liner notes, to see an alternate lyric that Craig weighed using; it should ring a bell, and that might give you an idea of what sort of conversation he's having.) Anyway, Mary, Holly, and Jesse all do quite a lot of more or less indiscriminate fucking, and they all get called hoodrats at different times. 3) When you put it that way, I think you're right about Rick Danko, actually: with Robbie Robertson / Robo already in place, it has to be a member of the Band, and one whose name fits the meter. I was thinking that there are plenty of rockers who got wrecked on drugs, but in fact there's only one who fits both the other conditions, and that's Danko. As for Mary: you are on it. I'm not going to spoil it because what happens has a little bit of a twist, and it's worth not spoiling. But you've put your finger on ground zero of the story. 4) Cool. That's one line where I'm more comfortable with the simpler explanation. Though I've gotten burned a lot by being comfortable with what "simple" lines mean. Tomorrow, I'm going to do a brief-as-possible timeline of events from the beginning of the story through the end of Holly's party. I hope that's going to help with following along. Side note: I was listening to One for the Cutters yesterday and the line "sniffing at crystal" hit me. So apparently speed can be sniffed, and the wikipedia article on meth ( link) says that it "occurs as white crystals or a white crystalline powder." With that I'm going to say that "Barry White" in CSunrise is speed after all. It might even be meth, I don't really know --- all I know is that Mary's drug use is focused on speed, that it goes from bad to worse, and that whatever she's doing in Cheyenne Sunrise isn't as strong as the "strong stuff" (which is definitely metal flake / crystal meth [Knuckles, SM, R&T]) that she takes in Sweet Payne. Apologies for making a hash of that; the details of how the kids are getting drunk/high are critical to the story, and I'm certainly trying to get it right, it's just that certain patterns of drug abuse are hard to fact-check. OK, now, Holly's party, one more time, through the lens of Milkcrate Mosh, with a little help from Stevie Nix. Milkcrate Mosh is another song from Mary's POV. She starts out saying: The gin was just like Gideon. The kings were just like Solomon. The bashes were like Babylon. and later adds: He smoked the Camel Filter Kings. "He" in the latter line is Gideon; not only does he get mapped to "the gin," he gets mapped to the "the kings," too. Gideon is being cast in the role of Solomon here. The story of Solomon in question is the Judgment of Solomon, the one about the two women and the Baby[lon], which begins like this [- I Kings 3:16]: From this alone, we understand that it's not just Holly who comes on to Gideon; Holly and Mary *both* come to him --- "there were a couple pretty crass propositions" [Weekenders] --- each making their pitch to be awarded "the baby" in exchange for his "party favors" [MM]. (It's "*all* the little phillies at the Yukon Club," after all, not just Holly, who "are gunning for the goldrush" [SPayne].) Mary describes all three of them going back behind the building together accordingly: We went back behind the building. He did a brisk little business. This casts a different light on things; it appears that Mary's intimately involved in the betrayal. In fact, we can see her agency behind it: Listen up closely to the lit tips of your cigarettes. Can't you hear the serpent hiss? Saying, sweet baby, suck on this. The "lit tips of your cigarettes" is plural; she's talking (silently) to both Holly and Gideon, trying to nudge them together. In these lines, the Biblical casting of events is shifted to the Garden of Eden, featuring Adam, Eve, and the serpent who gets blamed for original sin ("I heard the dude blamed the chick / I heard the chick blamed the snake" [CatCT]); but it's Mary who's behind them all. The white wine was the nectar. The oldies made me feel like Phil Spector. Is Charlemagne your main man, or is he just your sad protector? She feels like Phil Spector because she feels like she's a producer, putting the whole production together. And she asks Holly a question to which she already knows the answer: do you really consider yourself to be "with" Charlemagne? or is he just your sorry pimp? (Speaking of the drug/alcohol specifics being important: just like Gideon drinks gin and Mary drinks margaritas, it's always Mary who drinks wine; but we'll come back to that later.) You know you look so good together. But sometimes I get a feeling that you're a little bit restless. It's a small scene already and it gets dirty on the fringes. You sucked through his defenses. She continues her persuasion (overt, and subliminal: "You sucked through his defenses") of Holly. (Note that if it's Mary who's "faithless in fringes and feathers" [SS] here, then with "it gets dirty on the fringes" she's making a veiled allusion to her own train wreck appearance, encouraging Holly to compete with her.) And Holly responds: She said, I usually wouldn't do this. But I couldn't help but notice. You had that text across your T-shirt. It said: what would Judas do? Mary, the "faithless" [SS] "White Swan" [SN], wore that tattered Judas T-shirt to Holly's party as she did everything that night, with a deliberate purpose. She means to look like a wreck standing next to Holly, and to lose the Judgment. She wants Holly cleared out of the way. Even with Holly gone, she won't be able to have Charlemagne herself, as will soon appear. But that doesn't mean she isn't jealous. We see Mary's "production" in Stevie Nix, too. First, Mary brought Gideon in, high and looking for sex (compare "The jester kept on jacking off" [MM]): Some nights we just need to get touched and rub up against something plush Some nights it's just a crush and some nights it's blood lust Then, she stations him in the "coat check" [Weekenders] by the entrance, from which they'll be able to go "back around the building" [MM], and told him to wait there until she comes back "around dawn," dropping an innuendo that "we" (they're still with Holly at the entrance) "might use you later on": She said we might use you later on Meet me right back here around dawn The next verse flashes back to the ER scene in which Holly realizes that Gideon's got access to serious drugs, and forms a resolution to get them from him; this explains the background to Mary's scheme. Then, returning to the party, Holly hears Mary confide in her, wickedly: She said I love the guys you can't trust Meet me here about dusk Mary lets Holly know that Gideon's the sort of boyfriend "you can't trust," and that she's OK with the prospect of infidelities ("I love [those] guys"); she makes an appointment with Holly, too, to meet back up with her and Gideon "about dusk" (in the twilight of dawn). (There's a second level of allusion here to Stevie Nicks' Edge of Seventeen, in which the voice of the dove is heard "in the morning" and "at nightfall"; the "white swan" does in fact map to the "white-winged dove.") How things end up, we know. Holly won the Judgment of Solomon, is awarded Gideon's "baby," and gets Rocky Mountain High; then she and Gideon get off the grid together ("And after your party we got off the grid" [MoC]). We'll pick up there after the timeline tomorrow. Spencer, back to your question about hoodrats: I think this understanding of the events of Holly's party casts the end of Curves and Nerves in a darker light: These hoodrat chicks are like razor blades They're pretty cheap but they'll cut you deep We know now that Mary's not an innocent. She's the hand behind Charlemagne's heartbreak at Holly's party. And she's the one who answered the princess phone "when the call came in" [C&N] that lured Holly away the first time. The suggestion in these lines is that she may have had a hand in that first departure, too, whether by lying about the call, or by setting it up in the first place. I don't really have any further evidence for that, beyond the fact that there's precedent for it and it's plausible. She's a hoodrat too, after all, and pretty cheap. And she cut him deep. I hope tomorrow's timeline will help sew things up in a satisfying way. Thanks for your patience thus far, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 28, 2016 21:56:29 GMT -5
Back once more to the metal bar. We've already been through the history of Holly's departure for California, Charlemagne's subsequent financial troubles with the Skins, and the fact that he "went down to the taverns" [OwtB] to try to stabilize the situation. But the actual line is "we" went down to the taverns. So who exactly is "we"? It's the same "we" later referred to by Charlemagne, when remembering the day of the metal bar beatdown in Hornets! Hornets!: We were living up at Nicollet and 66th With three skaters and some hoodrat chick The "three skaters" here are the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon. The "hoodrat chick" is Mary. Holly lived with them before her departure for California, but now there's just the four of them --- the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Mary on the ground floor, and Gideon up in the loft [SN]. (Charlemagne thinks of the house with four, not five, inhabitants precisely because he's stopped to recall the times in suburban Minneapolis when the heavy stuff did after all end up "at its heaviest" [HH], and the day of the metal bar tops the list. More on this when we take apart Hornets! Hornets! in detail.) We actually get a view of Holly and Mary together in the house at Nicollet and 66th, before Holly left, in Curves and Nerves. Mary is the POV character of the song, as indicated, among other things, by the first line "The call came in on a princess phone on the patio" [C&N]. This is a riff on the opening of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, in which "the call came in" on a "pink telephone" in the "patio section" of the Beverly Hills Hotel's Polo Lounge; Craig ran with the same image, but altered "pink telephone" to "princess phone" in order to identify "princess" Mary [YGD, A&H, ASD] as the girl who answers. Note that Holly is already "back around the neighborhood" [MINTS] at the time of the metal bar episode, but living in another house with "some old lady" [CatCT] for a landlady. We know this because she showed up in the ER that night [SN] after she heard what happened to Charlemagne. We also have Mary's testimony that, "when the crowd went wild," Holly was "under the stands / Mouths and hands, hands and mouths" [C&N]. So the four friends got out of the house on Nicollet and 66th and headed down to the taverns. With that, let's review exactly what happened. The Skins ("all the living members of the Cityscape Skins" [C&N]) are coming off their Custer at Little Bighorn defeat ("down on their luck and still high from a street fight" [BBreathing]). When the kids show up they promise to "get [them] high" [SPayne] --- and they do, as far as that goes. They start by standing them drinks (see "open bar" [212M]), and end by giving them all a dose of meth ("we got dosed" [SM]) --- the first time, apparently, that any of the four has tried it. With the killer party [KP, GoaH] underway in earnest, each of the four experiences a very different night: Charlemagne -------------------- We went through most of Charlemagne's night already. But to recap, the Narrator's description in Barely Breathing gives us the most detail about what set things off: It got pretty sketchy. We tried to push forward. Now we're pointing at the scoreboard And it feels so amazing. And the crowd's going crazy. They're watching a show in the basement, high out of their minds on the "strong stuff" [SPayne]. But when they "[try] to push forward," Charlemagne knocks into Shepard [IHTWTDFY, LA, SS], who, having had enough of a shitty day of defeat, decides it's time to "show these kids," particularly the small-timer who owes them money but won't pay up, "some discipline" [SPayne]. That Shepard takes the lead in the beatdown is shown by the Narrator's description of him years later: "I've seen him destroy a dude before" [LA]. They beat the living hell out of Charlemagne, bashing him over the head with their motorcycle chains [RH, SPayne] until he's senseless and then some. The description, again, turns into that of a stadium sporting event: they're "pointing at the scoreboard" and watching as the Skins "[run] up the score" [IHTWTDFY], while "the crowd's going crazy" [BBreathing] / "wild" [C&N]. Charlemagne-Christ is being "scourged" and "smitten" in the judgment hall of Pilate, and is bleeding from the crown of thorns [John 19:1-3]. When the Skins are finally done with him, they leave him to bleed to death in the vestibule of the club [RH]. Narrator ------------ The Narrator also gets beaten, but not as badly: "Kids are getting beat up" [SPayne], "We were born to bruise" [BBlues]. Process of elimination identifies him as the one who gets Charlemagne to the ER [SN]; see the accounts of Gideon and Mary's night below. Gideon ----------- As we've seen, Gideon comes in for different handling: instead of beating him up, the Skins decide to jump him in [YGD, BBlues, HM]. That this happens on the same night as the metal bar beatdown is indicated by several pieces of evidence, the most immediate of which are: - "A shaved head and the blood on the bed" [SPayne]: the "shaved head" is Gideon getting his dreads shaved off [HM, BBlues, GLS]. - When he finally comes into the ER later that night, he's out of his mind [YGD] and behaving like a gangster ("drinking gin from a jam jar" [SN]); it's at that moment that he first becomes a target for Holly's "gunning for the gold rush" [SN, SPayne]. - When, as recounted in Runner's High, he finally comes to after being out of his mind for years (Gideon, sane again, is the POV character of RH; Charlemagne is the "you" who's come to him for help), the last thing he remembers is Charlemagne getting beat up and left to bleed to death in the metal bar vestibule: When I came to in Houston. I felt absolutely nothing. No voices no visions. I feel absolutely nothing. No pressure no Jesus. No crashes no hassles. I remember a dream about you. Getting hit on the head And left to bleed to death in the vestibule. Mary ------- Mary's experience is completely different. In Cheyenne Sunrise she foresaw "the new kids nodding off" [CSunrise], and in fact this is what happens: Strong stuff and she had more than enough And she was slumping over smiling and sailing off with cherubim But the specifics are a bit shocking. Enraptured ("smiling") by the vision of her Charlemagne-Christ being scourged, stigmata bleeding, she lets the Skins carry her upstairs ("sailing off with cherubim") and fucks them all night. The "blood on the bed" in Sweet Payne is hers: A shaved head and the blood on the bed Or as she describes it later in 212-Margarita: I hit the open bar and got myself all turned on Again, to be clear, this isn't drug slavery and it isn't rape; Mary knows exactly what she's doing, and is doing what she wants to do, as seen in Cheyenne Sunrise --- the only difference between that episode and this being in the strength of the drugs she's taking to get there. She's into meth now, and it won't be long before "more than enough" turns into never enough [SPayne]: All the little phillies at the Yukon Club Are gunning for the goldrush Yeah, they just can't get enough Her pleasure in the Skins' company is explicitly described in One for the Cutters: The girls gave her glares but the boys were quite pleasant ... Out on the parkways after the parties It was always arousing when they'd rev up their engines We note too that the full lyric in Curves and Nerves is When the crowd went wild we were under the stands Mouths and hands, hands and mouths In other words, while Charlemagne is getting almost killed, Mary and Holly are both doing the same thing; the difference is that Holly is getting paid for it somewhere, while Mary does it for her own enjoyment. The expression "sailing off with cherubim" is peculiar; what does it mean? We recall that "St. Theresa told me we should rattle our bones" [OWL] is an allusion to the book of Ezekiel (verse 37:7), and so is this. (See also "everything sparkles and appears like we're on wheels" [TSPotC].) Book 10 of Ezekiel describes the cherubim as composed of wheels, wings, and eyes [Ezekiel 10:12], and carrying on their back a sapphire throne [Ezekiel 10:1]: The wikipedia article on Ezekiel ( link) explains the meaning of this image: Sapphire is Mary, the living Throne of God and Queen of Heaven. Hope this is hitting home. Thanks for reading, and thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 27, 2016 23:59:30 GMT -5
Thanks spencer! Nice catch on the Journey/Trip idea; she's saying "drive around to the window" for some "hazardous chemicals" after all, so yeah, she's offering to send them on a trip. And we have Going on a Hike in which Craig plays further with the image of "travel" and "hiking" when he means getting high. That looks like a very good call. You must be right about the Band/"bar band" connection too, another nice find. I'm skeptical that the Mary/Danko parallel is explained by weight gain; fundamentally, Mary's a speed addict, and I'm pretty sure weight gain doesn't go with that --- see too all the stuff about famine, kids ripping into sugar packets [SM, CatCT, OWL], etc. ("Stumbling" [MPADJs] suggests physical coordination issues, mainly.) But the other thing that "her steps they made the records skip" seems to allude to, and I guess I can mention this without getting into the details yet, is that *Mary took steps to subtly change the future she saw in her visions*. I've already claimed that "records and tapes" mean visions, so if you're with me that far then you can put it together with "grant me some indulgences" [BCrosses], "it all went down exactly like your visions" and "these miracles work" [YS] to conclude that "her steps they made the records skip" could be read that way. Just throwing that out there; more on this when we get to the crucifixion. What *does* end up being a big problem for the heavy speeders is "meth mouth," where their teeth basically rot out of their heads. And that gets to be a worry for Mary later on; see The Only Thing where the Narrator says: Last night her teeth were in my dreams But we're not there yet; that's 10+ years from the time of the "first night" party --- here, Mary's a speed shooter, but hasn't graduated to meth yet. The decline is long and slow. (I should note, since who knows when I'll get back to it, that even the album title "Teeth Dreams" is a double entendre --- on the one hand, we have the Narrator's dreams about Mary's teeth; on the other, we have her dreams brought on by the "bite" of the meth-dealing "bugs.") It's possible that UPC is Universal Product Code, though it doesn't seem to me to fit as well. Let me come back to this from another angle below. Here's another Swish line that you might have a take on, by the way: "Moving pictures got us through to September." I remember reading someone's suggestion that it's an allusion to the Rush album, whose title is a "triple entendre" (wikipedia entry on Moving Pictures), and that the change in the signature of the music is a Rush homage. That could totally be --- even to my untrained ear, it sounds sort of Neal-Peart-esque. And I can imagine the allusion being sort of a general double-meaning alert. But I've wondered if there's something more there. Craig hits you over the head with "oh shit *that's* what that means" so often that the subtler stuff leaves me second guessing. Is there a Rush angle to "September"? Or, here's another thought. I've stated that films/videos/records/tapes/DVDs are all metaphors for visions, and "moving pictures" obviously fits that list. Is Holly saying that Mary somehow got them through to September? I don't really have any other evidence for that, so I don't know. Craig doesn't waste space, though, so there's a point to it somewhere. ---------- I promised a rundown of Cheyenne Sunrise. This song is sung from Mary's POV; unlike many of the songs, it relates a conversation that takes place at a specific point in time, after the "first night" party but before the metal bar beatdown. She's talking to the Narrator. When I left I wasn't thinking That I wasn't coming home But first Al Green And then Barry White Convinced me not to go And I didn't come home for fighting I came to bandage up my hand And if you're gonna talk to me like that Then I'll just go back out again Mary went out one evening (from the apartment at Nicollet & 66th, where she's living with the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon [HH]) and didn't come home. When she shows up again in the morning, the Narrator, who's still around and still concerned [HM, LID, TOT], confronts her about it. She tells him that she wasn't planning not to come home when she left; only that, once she got where she was going, the seduction of margaritas ("Al Green" [BBlues, 212M]) and then something white ("Barry White") convinced her not to go, with the implication that she's been getting high, seeing her visions, and fucking all night, so that her stigmata are bleeding (from holy/erotic ecstasy, just like at prom [YGD, OWL]) and she needs to bandage them up. She doesn't want to hear it from him (and again, he knows he has no standing to press the matter; see "I never want to make you feel uncomfortable / I hope I never did" [HM]); if he talks to her like that again she's just going to go back out. Two things here. It bugs me that I'm not sure what "Barry White" is; clearly the most likely thing is some form of speed that isn't yet meth, but if there's an obvious kind that would identify as "white" I just don't know what it is. In Barfruit Blues Mary was "sniffing margarita mix" to get the "white" of "red white and blue," and cocaine, which is sniffed, is the "white pony," so maybe it's coke. If someone can make a convincing link to speed, though, that would tighten things up. Internet isn't so good for answering these kinds of questions. Two, and this will be increasingly important later on: Mary's not turning tricks. She's staying out all night getting high and fucking because she really, really likes to get high and fuck. The Narrator has nothing to say here because she's doing exactly what she wants to do. When Charlemagne calls her a "borderline whore" [HF], it's meant literally; unlike Holly, she's not getting paid for it (she's a princess, not to mention a no-fail horse-race winner, and doesn't need the money). Lower back tattoos can mean whatever, but hers ("Girl you gotta cover that" [HM]) is a straight-up tramp stamp. This is consistent with the tradition of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute; according to wikipedia ( link): There's a lot more to say about this but it needs to wait until we get further into the story. But it's one reason why I don't think UPC stands for Universal Product Code; she's not dealing, and more importantly she herself is not for sale. Wipe that chip right off your shoulder We ain't getting any younger Some things are getting bigger Some things are falling off Some things they seem much harder Some other things stay soft She tells the Narrator to wipe the chip off his shoulder, his clinging to the outward things of a long time ago; the truth is that they're getting older now, and things are different than they used to be (this is the "Cheyenne Sunrise" theme, explained below). I don't know what is meant by "Some things are getting bigger / Some things are falling off." But I think the "harder/soft" lines refer to her: some things, like her body (see "just my body" below), seem harder; some other things, like the soul beneath, stay soft. We're tipping over in the taprooms We're shooting through the ceiling We're dying in the bathrooms And we're living For that one sweet, fleeting feeling It's been a few years since the "first night" party, and things aren't like they were. She describes the way they're living now, deeply addicted to drugs, sacrificing everything for one more chance to feel the "sweet, fleeting feeling" of their early highs (the same feeling that Holly too felt when she first started using, before she became "enslaved" [CiS], the high of their "first night" [FN]; this is again the "Cheyenne Sunrise" theme, a reminder of a time when the experience was wonderful and new; see below). Now they're a mess, "tipping over in the taprooms," "shooting through the ceiling," "dying in the bathrooms"; the only thing missing from the same litany as recited years later by the Narrator is "bleeding on the floor" [SM], and that's coming very soon (see her prediction about "your next party" below). I know my cough sounds awful Some nights it hurts a bit to breathe But I'm glad it's just my body I do my business on the street She admits that her cough (identifying her with St Therese of Lisieux [BBlues, MM, A&H, BCrosses, CSunrise]) sounds awful, and that her body is breaking down. But she's glad that it's just her body. Yes, she's a borderline whore, but that's just her body, too. We ain't getting any younger Tomorrow night we'll be that much older Some kids are growing awkward And some kids are going off We're fingering the punch bowl We're feeding from the trough There's nothing quite like a Cheyenne sunrise To make us has-beens feel too old Onward Christian soldiers We're gonna bash right through your borders I bet your next party gets sketchy I saw the new kids nodding off Some things are getting bigger Some things are falling off Some things seem much harder Some other things stay soft Once more she reminds him that they're getting older. And then she shares a vision about "tomorrow night," which we've already identified as a forecast of the metal bar incident. We're going to wrap up that episode tomorrow, so we'll revisit those lines then. But on the way, she describes the Cheyenne sunrise after which the song is titled: "There's nothing quite like a Cheyenne sunrise / To make us has-beens feel too old." So, what's this all about? We've said that most American place names in the story are metaphors, not literal cities and states, and that goes for this one too. "Cheyenne" isn't the city in Wyoming; to understand what Mary means by it, we have to turn back the clock to Minnesota of a few centuries prior. The Cheyenne ( wikipedia) were the indigenous tribe of the Twin Cities region at the time of the coming of the Europeans. Later (along with the Lakota) they were the US military's chief adversary in the Sioux Wars, including the Battle of Little Big Horn, at which Custer and his regiment were annihilated. In the THS canon the name of the tribe is associated both with the street-fight slaughter of the Skins in the "Indian fringes" on the day of the metal bar incident [BBreathing, C&N], and more broadly with the idyllic conception of the Twin Cities as the "wide open country" of the early western plains, idealized in the song "Don't Fence Me In." The repeated final verse of this song ("I want to ride to the ridge where the West commences / Gaze at the moon till I lose my senses / Can't look at hobbles and I can't stand fences / Don't fence me in") is referenced twice in the THS canon ("a burn for every cowboy who got fenced in" [SN]; "the wild west begins / right where your body ends" [SS]). When the kids first came to Minneapolis it seemed like paradise, but it wasn't long before the scene turned heavy and they found themselves trapped in addiction, gang dealings, etc. See Craig's comment in the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): The "fencing in" of the West is a metaphor for this same progression; when Mary sees the sunrise after staying out all night, she's reminded of what the scene used to be like, like the unspoiled plains when the Cheyenne roamed Minnesota, and how much older they've gotten since then. In Yeah Sapphire, Mary envisions Charlemagne pleading to let him take her to Cheyenne to start over, but not being the sharpest knife in the drawer, he thinks she means the city (he figures Aberdeen, SD is a good backup plan). The Narrator too alludes to the city [TSPotC], but does so with some understanding that it's an idea, not a place ("It's like distance doesn't equal rate and time no more"). In short Cheyenne, like other place names used in the songs, isn't properly a reference to the city in Wyoming. It's the ideal of a new and unspoiled paradise, "a simple place to score" without the plagues and entanglements of the scene turned ugly. There's at least one other tie-in to this theme, maybe two. We mentioned Saddle Shoes, in which the Skins in cowboy gear are hanging around the saddle shop. There's mention there of a girl who "appeared faithless in fringes and feathers" [SS], which in turn hearkens back to the other "Indian fringes"; putting them together, we get the image of a girl in Indian fringes and feathers who has "faithlessly" aligned herself with the cowboys. But which girl fits that description? That would be Mary herself, who entered Holly's party on Gideon's arm, in her train wreck "white tatters like feathers," as we put it, while "the guys from the front lawn were making jokes about the white swan" [SN]. White Swan ( wikipedia) was an Indian scout with Custer's regiment at the Battle of Little Bighorn, who fought with Custer against the Sioux and Cheyenne. There had to be a reason why Craig turned Stevie Nicks' "white-winged dove" into a "white swan"; it turns out it's because he's working it into the Cheyenne motif. In Look Alive, where Shepard is described as coming back from another defeat with "blood on his boots and an arrow in his hat" [LA], the Skins are riding the crosstown Lake Street bus through Minneapolis "down to the railroad yard" [LA] in St. Paul (which is to say, to the metal bar and environs; Railroad Island is adjacent to Payne Avenue). The implication is that they're coming, not just from the Wild West, but literally from west of Minneapolis. Part of that is that they actually do come from there; following Lake Street west just beyond the city limits, you first pass the Cityscape Apartments (5707 MN-7, St Louis Park, MN 55416) and a few blocks later Methodist hospital (6500 Excelsior Blvd, St Louis Park, MN 55426) where the Skins "hang" [LA]. I've never been to Minneapolis and it's hard to form a sense of this from internet images, but it sure looks like the "Cityscape Apartments" are so named precisely because they sit on "the ridge," such as it is, "where the West commences." (There's also a maze of streets named after Indian tribes off the "frontage roads" [MoC] along "169 ... up by Edina High" [HH] which could conceivably be the "Indian fringes." The whole cowboys/indians metaphor is so insane anyway, and so riddled with double entendres, that it's hard to completely write it off; but unless that's where Craig's house was or something, the evidence to make that case is pretty thin. What there is we'll review later.) That's enough, more than enough. I hope it's not too much. Again, thank you for sticking with this, and for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 27, 2016 0:00:36 GMT -5
OK, so what exactly happened that "first night"? Let's clean up the details ... First, they're in an Uptown bar (in SW Minneapolis, near the intersection of Lake Street and Hennepin Ave). We know this from the song First Night: Holly's not invincible, in fact she's in the hospital Not far from the bar where we met on that first night The "hospital" is Methodist hospital in St. Louis Park, just a little further up Lake Street from Uptown (the address is 6500 Excelsior Blvd, St Louis Park, MN). Methodist has a drug rehab program, which is why the Skins "hang" there [LA]; it's where they go to max out their "medicine" [SPayne], as the Narrator does too when his addiction gets to that point [AE]. More about this when we get to "Holly in the hospital" and to the THS geography overview. As noted earlier, there are two songs about this party: The Swish, with Holly as the POV character, and Barfruit Blues, with the Narrator as the POV character. We already covered a lot of the details here, but left a lot on the table that we're now in a position to explain. The Swish --------------- POV: Holly Pills and powders, baby, powders and pills We spent the night last night in Beverly Hills This chick, she looked just like Beverly Sills We got killed As described in Stevie Nix, Holly and Charlemagne have arrived in the Twin Cities. Holly describes their new scene as "Beverly Hills," the state of being high ("Hills"; see also "we can't get as high as we got / on that first night" [FN]). They came into the bar, and met Mary. In the 2014 Providence Phoenix interview ( link), Craig describes his use of pronouns instead of proper names as something deliberately "elliptical"; "some chick" is an "ellipsis" in this sense. There are examples of this all over the place, where friends and acquaintances refer to each other to in a way that would be unnatural in normal speech, e.g. "some kid's house" [OftC], "some hesher's apartment" [SS], "that dude from your crew" [R&T], "some guy she'd originally thought to be her savior" [HaRRF], etc. But this isn't normal speech; despite being referred to as "some chick," Mary's not a stranger to Holly --- she's her cousin [MINTS], and Holly knew her before she came to the Twin Cities [SN]. Mary is compared to Beverly Sills, the sorprano whose signature role was Violetta, the tubercular prostitute heroine of La Traviata, who suffers a star-crossed love affair with the male lead (compare Mary's cough, apparent prostitution, and unfulfilled love for Charlemagne). Violetta dies in the end, foreshadowing what's coming up: "we got killed." Tights and skirts, baby, skirts and tights We used to shake it up in Shaker Heights This chick, she looked just like Patty Smyth She seemed shaky but nice Like the hills of "Beverly Hills," the heights of "Shaker Heights" are the state of being high. Mary's here described as looking like Patty Smyth. I've got the point of enough of these insane comparisons to celebrities that I'm certain they all have one, but some of them are tough to parse, and I honestly have no idea what this one's about. On the cover of The Warrior, Patty Smyth appears to have red streaks on her face; maybe that's supposed to recall "Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix"? That's all I got. She seemed "shaky but nice"; she's come down a bit since high school. Four years of the drugs and the parties are adding up. She said my name's Rick Danko, baby People call me One-Hour Photo I got some hazardous chemicals So drive around to the window Rick Danko, obviously there's symmetry with Robbie Robertson as a member of The Band, but beyond that I don't know how he turns into One-Hour Photo. "One-Hour Photo" is apparently a nickname in reference to the visions (and then of course Craig plays on the One-Hour Photo shack image with "drive around to the window"). She said my name's Robbie Robertson but people call me Robo I blew red white and blue right into a tissue I came right over the counter just to kiss you I came right over the counter just to kiss you Robbie Robertson becomes Robo, short for Robitussin, and a nickname in reference to the cough (and an over-the-counter drug). We already linked the kiss and "red white and blue" to Barfruit Blues, so let's deal with those in that context. We also did the Ginger and Jack verse in depth a few days back. Moving on: Shoes and socks, baby, socks and shoes We spent the night last night in Newport News This chick, she looked just like Elizabeth Shue We got bruised The blood loss from Mary's stigmata is accompanied by heavy circles around the eyes; we see that especially in Lord, I'm Discouraged, where the Narrator says of her: The circles have sucked in her eyes ... And she keeps insisting The sutures and bruises are none of my business She says that she's sick, but she won't get specific The sutures and bruises are none of my business This guy from the northside comes down to visit His visits, they only take five or six minutes (The guy from the northside is Charlemagne-Christ; the visits that take about five or six minutes are the visions.) Mary is described here as looking like Elizabeth Shue, alluding to her role as a prostitute who is badly beaten (with a couple of black eyes) in Leaving Las Vegas. This also foreshadows what's coming up: "we got bruised." She said my name's Steve Perry, baby People call me Circuit City I'm so well connected My UPC is dialed into the system The Steve Perry reference escapes me, but the rest --- Circuit City, well-connected, and UPC dialed into the system --- are all allusions to Mary's visionary sensitivity, in keeping with all the audio/video metaphors for her gift. UPC stands for Uplink Power Control ( wikipedia), a boost in transmission power to overcome signal degradation. She said my name's Neal Schon but people call me Nina Simone Some people call me Andre Cymone 'Cause I survived the '80s one time already And I don't recall it all that fondly So hold steady I don't know what Neal Schon is for besides the rhyme with Simone/Cymone, and of course he and Steve Perry are both members of Journey. The comparison to Nina Simone makes Mary the "High Priestess of Soul" but in a pointedly religious sense; the comparison to Andre Cymone is for "Survivin' in the 80's" --- she "got screwed up" [SN] by the events of high school, with religion, the visions, and the drugs. But it's the 90's now. The rest of The Swish comes after the party, and we already did it anyway, so let's move on to Barfruit Blues. Though I should parse the name of the song while we're breaking it down. It's another double-entendre: "swishing through the City Center" suggests a sprightly walk in a skirt, but in fact it's a reference to Holly blowing gangsters, as in "swish" / "rinse your mouth out." Barfruit Blues -------------- Barfruit is all the crap that gets thrown in drinks, olives, cherries, lemon and lime wedges. The song is sung from the POV of the Narrator, who's at the party as part of the band. The song makes a lot of reference to things that happened both before and after the bar party, but most of it is present-tense. We'll pick up the things that happened before and during the party here. Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix Mary saw her first vision of Charlemagne at seventeen [SN], and loved him [HM], but was soon disillusioned and gave up on her faith (the 80's were bad for her principally in this way). Gideon chides her for this in A Slight Discomfort: And you say you tried Jesus. But it was too inconvenient. You just didn't have the patience. You say you said prayers. But it felt like there was nobody there. So she gave up hope, and abandoned herself to a downward spiral ... and then her cousin walked into the party with Charlemagne, her Christ, in the flesh. The Narrator thinks she got a bloody nose, but what happened is that she's spontaneously begun bleeding from the stigmata, in transports of religious joy. Her Christ is there after all. He's real. She licked her lower lip and then she kissed that Halleluiah chick She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip We talked about the kiss that links Barfruit Blues to The Swish already. She "came off kind of spicy" in that she seems to be a degenerate party girl, but the Narrator knows her as "that sweet missing songbird when the choir sings on Sunday" [LID]. "Those pickle chips" are Famous Dave's Signature Spicy Pickle Chips, a Twin Cities thing; apparently they're labeled "Hellfire" but they're not spicy at all, they're super sweet. (Internet knows a lot of shit.) And in saying she tasted sweet, he's talking about going down on her during prom [MN, YGD, OWL]. "Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip": there's some deeper meaning here but the main thing is that she's lost a step since her days as a "damn good dancer" at prom [HM, OWL]. Again, the drugs have taken a toll on her body. "She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip": this is the other side of the reference to the mutual-going-down back at prom, when she went down on him. "chicken strip" is the unworn side of a motorcycle tire, next to the rim, evidence that you're too chicken to bank it on curves. And we have an idea that, with her fading off into periodic visions, Mary does come off "kind of crunchy." Dripping wet with the special sauce She had a confident smile and a nervous cough And we got off Mary was dripping wet with stigmatic blood just now (and no doubt downstairs too, but this line is more double entendre as misdirection, than double entendre for its own sake). She's got her cough, but she's smiling confidently as she beholds her Christ. And finishing the reminiscence about prom, the Narrator remembers that, yes, the two of them got off. She said, "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby." I said, "It's great to see you're still in the bars." She said, "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby." I said, "It's great to see you're still in the bars." The Narrator is conflicted as hell here. There's sincerity, but a lot of bitterness in "It's great to see you're still in the bars." Then we get some asides about Gideon and Holly, both present, and finally the Narrator closes: These clever kids are killing me For one they ain't that clever Number two, it really sucks when you get stuck here with these Trevors This was supposed to be a party This sucks this sucks this sucks. These kids are bad news; it was supposed to be a party. But now Charlemagne and Holly need a place to stay, and Mary is inviting them to get a house together with her and Gideon, and she's inviting the Narrator too. Half the crowd is calling out for "Born To Run" The other half is calling out for "Born To Lose" Baby, we were born to choose We got the last call bar band really, really, really big decision blues We were born to bruise We were born to bruise We were born to bruise The Narrator has to make a big decision: whether to say no, and run; or say yes, and sign up to lose. He opts for yes, and it won't be long before the path he's chosen will get the shit beat out of him down at the metal bar. Just before midnight. Thanks for reading, and please say a prayer for Still Alive Carl if you can.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 25, 2016 22:38:29 GMT -5
Thank you man! Those positive jams are massively appreciated, sincerely. I'm glad you're enjoying the rest too.
Here's the rest of the early stuff out of Hostile, Mass., Stevie Nix, and Charlemagne in Sweatpants for good measure.
Hostile, Mass. --------------
POV character is the Narrator, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end.
A knockoff necktie The way he wore it made it look more like a tourniquet I looked deep in his eyes I saw Lynn, Massachussetts
This is Charlemagne, described by the Narrator on their first meeting at the "first night" bar party, when he showed up with Holly. He's a guy who rolls with a cheap suit and tie (see Craig's "someone who would wear a purple suit" in the 2005 MAGNET interview).
She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle Girl you gotta cover that He was gushing blood from wide open wounds And she decided that she loved him
We covered this; this is Mary, scantily clad, lower-back-tatted; she saw crucified Charlemagne in a vision (Stevie Nix tells us she was 17 when it first happened), gushing blood from his wounds, and decided that she loved him.
He had a painters cap, it said "Panama Jack" It had the flaps on the back that kept the sun off his neck He woke up deep in Hostile, Massachussetts Reaching out to try to touch the special effects
He had no shoes and no pants And they dressed him in a shirt with a collar and called him Porky Pig The two of you went up to his room Later on you wouldn't admit you did
We covered most of this; this is Gideon, who was jumped in and hazed by the Skins, had his head shaved, and woke up in the state of Hostility.
But the last two lines are new to us. The "you" of Hostile, Mass. is Mary; the Narrator tells her that he saw her going with Gideon up to his room, even though she wouldn't admit it later. The obvious implication is that, like Holly later on, she was trading sex for Gideon's new access to serious drugs. Mary and Gideon are still an item here, even though he's lost his mind; nevertheless the Narrator is dismayed at her new taste for the harder stuff, and tries to confront her about it. But as we'll see, Mary is serious about what she's doing. Well-meaning or not, she isn't taking that from him.
Seeing lousy movies but only for the A/C Skimpy little outfits and bad guys acting crazy That's how I know when you're lying It looks just like overacting
We've mentioned the telephone/television/stereo metaphor for visions, and video/radio/films all go in that same metaphoric bucket. Mary likes to hang out in the theaters because watching her "films" is what she lives for. The Narrator insists that they're only there for the A/C; in other words, they're not fooling around --- he's there because he really loves her (see "Sat in the back of the theater just drinking and talking" [AE]). Again, following on the last verse, "skimpy little outfits" is Mary, "bad guys acting crazy" is Gideon. The Narrator knows when she's lying because it looks like overacting; they've had these confrontations more than once.
Kids on the corner are cracking and caving in Turning over and turning other kids in I never want to make you feel uncomfortable I hope I never did
Things are bad out there with the kids cracking and caving in, etc.; the Narrator just wants to protect her from that, he says. But even though he loves her, he knows he has no standing to try to stop her, or to criticize; he can only lamely express his concern, and wish she would change her mind. "I never want to make you feel uncomfortable / I hope I never did."
They met as kids he was angry and angsty Yeah, she was a damned good dancer I'll be damned if they didn't disappear Wandered out of Mass one day and faded into the fog and love and faithless fear.
We already covered the first two lines: Charlemagne and Mary "met as kids" in her visions, when she was still in high school. She was a damned good dancer, back then. The last two lines belong to much later in the story; we'll get to them later.
Stevie Nix ----------
The POV character of Stevie Nix is Holly, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end. Here again we'll just deal with the parts that occur from the beginning of the story through Holly's party.
You came into the party with a long black shawl And the guys from the front lawn were making jokes about the white swan Some nights we just need to get touched and rub up against something plush Some nights it's just a crush and some nights it's blood lust
Again, the "you" of Stevie Nix is Gideon. He came into Holly's party dressed like a magician; he was accompanied by Mary, who was dressed like a train wreck [Weekenders] in white tatters like feathers (compare "stylish tatters" [NS]; that's from another episode, but this is how Mary rolls). Gideon's high on speed and looking for sex.
She said we might use you later on Meet me right back here around dawn
The "she" of Stevie Nix is Mary. Before this week is out we'll do a final pass through Holly's party, and will explain what's going on here.
You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after bar You know you're weak and effete and I'm coming up from the streets You're up in your loft getting soft and I'm coming up the stairs and I'm coming from the streets
This is a switch of timeframe back from Holly's party to the night of the metal bar incident a few days prior.
Charlemagne is in the ER after getting almost killed in the beatdown. Holly's there too, having heard about what happened and come to see him. Then Gideon comes in, out of his mind and drinking gin from a jam jar, because he's a gangster now (when we wrap up the last details about the metal bar in a few days, we'll see that he was there too, and that the night of the beating is the night when he got jumped in). The nurse cracks the after-bar joke because the beatdown was after midnight [BBreathing], and it's close to dawn (the thing that triggered Holly's memory at the end of the last verse).
Holly takes one look at Gideon's new status, and determines to make him hook her up with the Skins' goods ("gunning for the gold rush" [SPayne]). She's much tougher than him: she's out on the streets turning tricks for her drugs, and she'll be damned if she can't make a softie like him give her what she wants.
She said I love the guys you can't trust Meet me here about dusk
Mary again; we'll get to this when we wrap up with Holly's party.
I was half dead then I got born again I got lost in all the lights but it was okay in the end And when we hit the Twin Cities, I didn't know that much about it I knew Mary Tyler Moore and I knew Profane Existence
Holly pans out to an overview of her life in the Twin Cities, taking in the whole story at once. We know that she got born again, because she says she did in CatCT (some versions of MM say so too); beyond that, the first two lines are still pretty vague.
But the next two lines are straightforward: "we hit the Twin Cities" is the first thing that identifies her in the song, since she and Charlemagne are the only two characters who arrived there together. At the time, she didn't know that much about it; all she knew were her cousin Mary ("Mary Tyler Moore") and Mary's boyfriend Gideon --- the Ghost who "didn't seem all that holy" [A&H] but in fact rather unholy (profane), and who had "a cross all upside down carved in his arm" [Ambassador].
She got screwed up by religion She got screwed by soccer players She got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River Lord, to be seventeen forever
Now we're back to Mary, the "she" of SN.
Raised Catholic, she got screwed up by religion; we have a pretty good idea about that by now. Gideon refers to this upbringing gone a bit wrong when he says "you say you tried Jesus" [ASD]; later we see her praying for indulgences [BCrosses].
She got screwed by soccer players: these are the other "bougie guys" that she was originally "through with" [ASD], before the Narrator met her in the Party Pit and became the last addition to their number.
She got high for the first time at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River / Lord, to be seventeen forever. This is the time when the visions started (the time as of which she was through with the soccer-player bougie guys). Records and Tapes is specific about the date (again, records/tapes here mean her visions of Charlemagne, not music; they are part of the television/radio/video/film/stereo/telephone set of metaphors for visions): "She fell in love with the records and tapes," that is, she fell in love with her visions of Charlemagne, "staying out late, summer '88" [R&T].
And she got screwed up by her visions It was scary when she saw him She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River Lord, to be seventeen forever
We know about the visions, and we know that "he" is Charlemagne. "She didn't tell a single person about the camps on the banks of the Mississippi River" is the exact same thing that's reported of the girl in One for the Cutters, another indication that it's Mary:
It was hard to describe so she kept it a secret The girls that she lived with, they knew nothing about it
Charlemagne in Sweatpants -------------------------
We know Charlemagne in Sweatpants is a "boy meets girl and the rest is history" song: here I'm just going to pick up the basic early-story stuff and hold off on the rest.
Once again, the POV character is the Narrator, telling from a viewpoint out of time; events range from the beginning of the story to the end.
When he's holding then the streetlamps, they seem an awful lot like spotlights Yeah, sometimes Charlemagne gets uptight Running numbers between bars, running girls between the cars And sometimes Charlemagne feels all right All right All right
This is an introductory sketch of Charlemagne, as a kid in Lynn, Massachusetts. That he's a kid is suggested by his holding under streetlamps ("kids on the corner" [HM, Oaks], "boys working the corners" [Citrus]), by his gofer job running numbers, and of course by "boy meets girl." Besides selling on the corners and running numbers, he's doing a little pimping too, which sets us up for his solution to the how-to-come-up-with-seven-grand problem in YGD. (See also Craig's quip about a "pimp / second-generation drug dealer.")
Charlemagne had eyes just like a lover Last winter there was weather and his eyes they iced right over Casanova's in the corner and he's asking for a dance Speed shooters driving 'round and coming down and trying to hook up with an entrance [sung] / exit [liner notes] ramp
Fast forwarding to the time of Holly's party ... Charlemagne "had eyes just like a lover," but wasn't actually a lover; as Holly says of him in Swish, "They made a movie about me and you / They made it half nude and half true" [Swish]. In other words, the true half was the non-nude half. More about this to come.
Last winter was the winter of Holly's 18th year, when she was off in California, doing porn, and becoming increasingly addicted to speed ("iced out" [HF]). Now she's back, at her 19th birthday party, and Gideon ("Casanova," Mr. Lover) is in the corner ("you in the corner with a good-looking drifter" [CatCT], "there was a kid camped out by the coat check" [Weekenders]) asking for a "dance" with her.
There's also "speed shooters driving 'round and coming down and trying to hook up with an entrance [sung] / exit [liner notes] ramp"; this is a complicated line, but refers in part to Holly both trying to hook up with a reliable supply (see "if he wants to buy me some" [C&N]), and also trying to escape her fears (see "trying to reach emancipation" [GLS], "all freed up from the fears" [MM]). More about this later too.
Holly was supposed to be at CCD but she was walking around on shady streets She was looking around for something she could take up to a party And it's not like she's enslaved, it's more like she's enthralled She don't need it but she likes it so she always makes that call
First it makes her feel tall, then it makes her feel small and it's all a sweet fleeting feeling ...
This is an introductory sketch of Holly, as a kid in Lynn, Massachusetts. (We know it's Lynn and not Boston, because in CatCT it's reported that she made a "visit to the city" with the "subway.") She's in high school, still in CCD --- which is to say that she's several years younger than Charlemagne --- but into getting high too. We know there'll come a time when she needs it and is enslaved, but that's not yet; on the other hand, the distinction between enslaved and enthralled is pretty technical, and foreshadows her troubles to come (making her freedom/emancipation quest pretty ambiguous too). She was walking around the shady streets looking to buy, and met Charlemagne dealing on the corner (the lead-in with him holding under the streetlamps sets this up).
She's Alice in Wonderland, an innocent in this world of drug exaltation, getting high and then coming down again too soon. For now.
Tomorrow we'll wrap up the loose ends of the "first night" party.
Thank you for reading along. Still Alive Carl needs anything you can think his way, so if that's something you can do, thank you for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 24, 2016 15:51:09 GMT -5
So what happened with Mary and the Narrator at prom in the spring of 1989?
I'd figured out a lot of other things before this, including some of the important details of the crucifixion scene. But now that I see how long this whole explanation is running, I realize I need to start setting things out in story order.
As it turns out we have *three* songs about prom night --- all told from the Narrator's point of view, but each with a different emphasis. The three songs are You Gotta Dance, Massive Nights, and Our Whole Lives.
Our Whole Lives is the detailed account that answers the questions left hanging by the other two. I'm just going to go through the whole thing verse by verse.
The kids are ripping into sugar packets. Townies taking off their tavern jackets. I'm in the pews sticking bills in the basket. Praying that they're cool when I come pick up the package.
Tonight we're gonna have a really good time. But I want to go to heaven on the day I die. Going to make like a preemptive strike. Hit the 5:30 mass early Saturday night.
It's Saturday night before the prom. The kids are high ("We were all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN]), so they're eating sugar [CatCT]; there's excitement in the air. The Narrator is at the early 5:30 mass, making a "preemptive strike" for all the sins he's going to commit tonight. He's sticking bills in the basket and praying --- praying that when he gets to the package store (the liquor store or "packie" [MPADJs]) later, they won't give him any problems about buying a bottle, even though he's a high schooler.
Ring ring ring goes the telephone. Tell my little lambs that I'm on my way home. Stop by the shop and get a bottle to go. And maybe something stronger If the right guy's on the corner.
It's the Narrator all right, dreaming of his little lambs; tell them, he says, that he's headed "home," into the heaven of the Unified Scene. Compare Most People are DJs:
And when I dream I always dream about the scene All these kids they look like little lambs looking up at me
and Stay Positive:
When the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen I knew that we'd arrived at a unified scene And all those little lambs from my dreams Well, they were there too He describes the dream as a phone call; heaven is calling, he feels it coming. Time to go. He's going to stop by the packie and get a bottle to take along, plus maybe something to get high on, if the right kid is dealing on the corner.
Bang bang bang go the quarter notes. Saint Theresa told me we should rattle our bones. Now you're going off to the dial tone. Some kid started blowing on a saxophone.
Now they're at the dance and things are in full swing. The quarter notes are going "bang bang bang," full of sexual overtone; he's really into this girl, and wants her badly. Mary ("Saint Theresa" confirms that it's Mary) told him "we should rattle our bones"; maybe, he's thinking, she meant they should dance; maybe she meant they should fuck. ("Rattle our bones" is a reference to raising the dead by prophecy [Ezekiel 37:7]; the precog girl is giving him a hard-on.)
But something's happening; suddenly he's "going off to the dial tone" --- that is, he's going off, but all of a sudden she's not with him, she's off in her own world, as if the phone call from heaven hung up on him. What's she listening to? Some kid started blowing on a saxophone; what's that?
For me, this was a real holy-shit moment. There are a lot of places where Craig breaks the rules of conventional narration; lots of play-within-the-play episodes, unreliable tellings, selective accounts, etc. But I'm not even sure what you call this. Mary is getting excited, and slipping into her ecstatic state; the "some kid" she's paying attention to is her vision of Charlemagne, and the saxophone is a reference to the sax solo at the end of Hostile, Mass:
She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle Girl you gotta cover that He was gushing blood from wide open wounds And she decided that she loved him ... They met as kids he was angry and angsty Yeah, she was a damned good dancer ...
Mary is the "damned good dancer," as we are finding out right now, at prom: "I didn't know that you could dance like that" [OWL].
She and Charlemagne "met as kids": this isn't actually the first time they "met" in her vision; Stevie Nix tells us that "she got high for the first time" and "got screwed up by her visions / It was scary when she saw him" at seventeen. She's eighteen now (and besides, the first time was "at the camps down by the banks of the Mississippi River" [SN], not at a dance). But yeah, she saw Charlemagne being crucified, "gushing blood from wide open wounds"; and right then, at seventeen, "she decided that she loved him."
"She hung a sleeveless dress up on a sleeved up lifestyle / Girl you gotta cover that" is confirmation of two things we've already noted. One, she's a princess (high-class provenance symbolized by "sleeveless dress," in opposition to her low-class lifestyle). Two, she wears revealing clothing ("sleeveless dress" goes with "tight white rayon slacks" [Swish] and "wearing see-thru / It was standard issue" [TSPotC]). It's not just showing skin ("sleeveless"), either; you can even see the tattoo on her lower back ("sleeved-up lifestyle" being a reference both to her tat-style lifestyle in general, and to the one she's actually got down there: "Girl you gotta cover that").
So Mary's starting to get pulled away by her vision of Charlemagne ("These teenage chicks ... I swear they must get sucked up by the television" [TL]). Without having a clue about the details, the Narrator knows she kinda goes off sometimes --- he calls her by the St. Theresa nickname --- but right now he wants to keep her here, with him.
Cheerleaders dream of quarterbacks. Jock Jills go for jumping Jacks. Goth girls love the vampire bats. They wanna draw a little blood for their bath.
I don't go much for all that spooky stuff. I like the lights and the uptempo tracks. You're damn right I believe in love. Because I've been in love and I've loved right back.
There's all kinds of girls in high school who like all kinds of guys; but he doesn't want any of them, and he's saying no here and now to the "spooky stuff." He likes the lights and the uptempo tracks. He's in love, dammit.
The words betray his vulnerability: the spooky stuff is coming straight on in front of him, and "I've been in love and I've loved right back" doesn't express a lot of confidence about whether she actually loves him. But he loves her, and damned if he isn't going to fight to have her love him too. So he steps it up.
Bang bang bang goes the backing track. Some kid is coming around with the magic backpack. I didn't know that you could dance like that. "I'm gonna have to ask that you take two steps back."
And it looks like he's winning. To his surprise and delight, she's a "damn good dancer" [HM]. On cue, as reported in Massive Nights, the chaperone steps in, and asks them to take two steps back ("I had my mouth on her nose / When the chaperone said that we were dancing too close" [MN]).
Sing sing sing every song we know. Blowing out the speakers on your stereo. You finally stopped talking about that boy back home. Maybe that's just better. If you want you can sleep over.
They sang and made noise until they drowned out the sound on Mary's "stereo" (we've seen a few instances of visions being described as telephone or television, and this is a regular metaphor; more on that later). And it's working; she finally stopped talking about Charlemagne, whom the Narrator at this time thinks is "that boy back home." (Mary either moved to the Twin Cities from Tennessee, or else in her cryptic, "weird-talking" way left him to understand that she did: "She always claimed that she was from Tennessee" [TSPotC].) So the Narrator makes his move, and invites her to sleep over. Yes!
We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives. We're good guys but we can't be good every night. Father I have sinned. And I want to do it all again tonight.
And she went for it. He went down on her ("I was down on my knees / When the chaperone said that it was time for me to leave" [MN]). He has sinned all right. And he wants to do it again, tonight.
The townies taking off their tavern jackets. Making guitars out of tennis racquets. It's been getting so the hardest part. Is trying to talk some sense into our sparkling hearts.
He's high and happy of out of his mind now ...
Ring ring ring goes the telephone. Tell my little lambs that I ain't coming home. Yes yes yes go the majorettes. They lead the band onto the field with their cigarettes.
The "telephone" rings again, but with a summons that's a little less lofty than the Unified Scene (the Narrator means it in a tongue-in-cheek way, but there's foreshadowing going on here). Mary says "yes" to his proposal, and with her cigarette held high like a baton, she leads him out of the gym onto the field for round two (they "hit it again on the south side of the gym" [YGD]; this time she's going to go down on him). Besides the telephone and the lambs, there are other familiar metaphors here:
- majorette: "I saw a small town parade and the lead majorette / She made me feel all weak in the knees" [GoaH] (that is, he got on his knees [MN] and went down on her; that's another reference to the same event).
- the band: a regular way of referring to the Narrator; in You Gotta Dance, "say a prayer for the boys in the band" means "say a prayer for the Narrator," in parallel with the earlier "say a prayer for sweet Charlemagne" etc. We're going to see this shortly in Barfruit Blues too, where "We got the last call bar band really, really, really big decision blues" means that the Narrator has a big decision to make.
- cigarettes: in Milkcrate Mosh, too, the cigarette is the instrument of temptation: "Listen up closely to the lit tips of your cigarettes. / Can't you hear the serpent hiss? / Saying, sweet baby, suck on this."
Bang bang bang she's a cleaning freak. She scrubs the surface until it's sparkling. Neat neat neat until her fingers bleed. She was giving off blue light on the first night that she came to me.
They're outside on the field, on the south side of the gym [YGD], and now she's down on him ("bang" is again a double entendre with the second meaning "fuck"). She's "scrubbing [his] surface until it's sparkling" ...
And then something weird happens: her fingers start bleeding. At the time, the Narrator thinks it's because she was "scrubbing" him too hard. But we know what's really going on: she's seeing Charlemagne, and like St. Theresa being pierced by Christ's lance, she's in ecstasy, and bleeding from her stigmata.
The meaning of "came to me" is obviously sexual, and "blue light" has a double meaning: there's the sexual expression meaning "to be turned on," like in the Talking Heads song Creatures of Love: "when the blue spark hits your brain"; but in the case of Mary, it's the blue light of the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven.
So the Narrator didn't win after all: she's been exalted to heaven all right, but away from him, not with him. This, we realize, is the meaning of the Party Pit line "So we sailed off on some separate trips": the Narrator thought he was going off with Mary, but Mary was going off with Charlemagne.
We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives. We're good guys but we can't be good every night. We're good guys but we can't be good our whole lives.
She was giving off blue light on the first night that she came to me. Father I have sinned and I want to do it all again eventually.
And that last line is also full of foreshadowing: he wants to do it all again ... eventually. Maybe he can't be good his whole life. But he's going to be waiting for Mary for a long, long time.
Most of the end of the You Gotta Dance take on the story is now explained:
So say a prayer for the boys in the band. I was out of my head so it was out of my hands. White wine and some tallboy cans. They powered up and they proceeded to jam, man.
Hit it again on the south side of the gym and my one friend got two girls in a twist. I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists. But you know you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with.
The Narrator ("the boys in the band") was out of his head, all right ("the hardest part / Is trying to talk some sense into our sparkling hearts" [OWL]); he was drunk (for "White wine" [YGD] see also "All that wine was tight" [MN]) and high (for "powered up" [YGD] see also "all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN]), and partying with all his might.
Then, after he went down on her and got told to leave by the chaperone, she took him outside to "south side of the gym" where they "hit it again," meaning that she went down on him. But his "one friend" --- this, in a nod to the future, is Charlemagne --- "got two girls," including Mary, "in a twist" (there's both the high-school dance "twist" meaning, and the "tangled-up" meaning here). We know enough to realize that the second girl could be either Holly or Jesse, depending on how you look at it. There's a precise meaning, but we're going to have to come back to it later, when we know more about how things go with the girls in the years after Holly's party.
At any rate, Charlemagne's "presence" caught Mary up and carried her away, and the Narrator was left with someone who wasn't with him, someone bleeding from her hands: "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists." And now, well, "you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with." Craig's spent the earlier part of the song expertly setting up the metaphoric meaning of the phrase --- that when you voluntarily go down a path, you have to live with the consequences --- and then flips from that into this strictly literal use, which, loaded with all the weight of the metaphor, hits like a knockout punch. Nowhere to hide from it. This is just brilliant writing.
And the end of Massive Nights:
She had the gun in her mouth And she was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that we'd been crowned The king and the queen
We know now that "the gun in her mouth" is when Mary's going down on him outside. On the one hand he's the one doing the "shooting," but on the other, it's she who's going off on a trip in the world of her "dreams," with the vision of Charlemagne overpowering her experience and her senses.
The chaperone's announcement lands ironically, with the same party-killing force of "we were dancing too close" and "it was time for me to leave," but 1000x heavier. It's over.
Just to complete the story, we get a view of these same events from Mary's point of view in Ascension Blues, when she tells Charlemagne about what *she* saw that night [ABlues]:
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
There are three bits that identify this as the same scene on prom night:
- "court": they're in the gym for the dance [see YGD, OWL]
- "he knelt before the sword": the vision she's having is the vision of Charlemagne-Christ's "crucifixion," that is, his being stabbed; his kneeling before the knife is overlaid on the Narrator getting "down on [his] knees" to make her come [MN, GoaH].
- "There was feedback in the speakers and the soundman fried the board": the Narrator thinks that with enough singing and noise he's "Blowing out the speakers on your stereo" [OWL], but he's got it backward; it's the vision of Charlemagne that's blowing out her actual sensations, so that all she sees / hears / feels is him.
And we can fill in most of the rest:
- "She said he tasted like the Calvin Klein": Calvin Klein underwear, that is; she went down on him [YGD, OWL].
- "She said we had a pretty huge time": they had a Massive Night.
- "I'm pretty sure I went there once before": yeah, it's not something Charlemagne can really remember, but he was there all right. (Both the significance and the hedging expression are like that of "You could say our paths have crossed before" [Weekenders]; see also "They met as kids" [HM]).
- "She said he looked like Jimmy Connors": there's a lot to explain here, but for now consider that Craig basically used an extra verse in OWL just to mention "The townies taking off their tavern jackets. / Making guitars out of tennis racquets." The tennis racquets give us Jimmy Connors; in Mary's vision of the crucifixion, Charlemagne is dressed like a townie. And that fits with what we know from One for the Cutters and Both Crosses: the crucifixion takes place at a townie party in the Party Pit. It also explains something about princess Mary's "hard to describe" [OftC] attraction to townies.
I love these songs. YGD is so compact and so brilliant. MN manages to take the elements of this devastating moment and spin them into an anthem of high-school nostalgia that the world can relate to. And OWL makes us feel the excitement and innocence of the Narrator, and his subsequent heartbreak, in a way that is carefully guarded almost everywhere else.
It wasn't until the thing with the saxophone hit me that I understood who the Narrator really is, and where he's at through this whole long epic. He's in love with Mary, and has been from day one. She's going to a dark place with her eyes on someone else. But because he loves her, he's going to stick with her the whole way.
These things always take much longer to write out than I ever imagined they would. My apologies to people reading along who wish it were shorter, I don't know how to make claims like this without going through the evidence; when I look at the annotations to Our Whole Lives on Genius, for example, it feels like not a single point can be taken for granted. Plus I think there's a credit for what Craig's done here that is due in full, that shouldn't be shortchanged. Again, I promise a complete and compact summary of these early phases of the story in just a few days.
If you're still here, thanks, and if you can take a moment to remember Still Alive Carl, thank you very much.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 23, 2016 12:09:37 GMT -5
When we were trying to figure out who the precog girl is, we noted that girls with hand/wrist bandages show up in a lot of songs: - "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I came to bandage up my hand" [CSunrise] - "Nine stitches and bandages ... So keep your bandages clean" [SS] - "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD] - "Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists" [SK] What's this all about? There's a constant suggestion of suicide attempts, or assault, or some other violent reason for the bandages. Yet we never see a hint of the violence itself, or even a motivation for it. The answer hit me one night when I was listening to Almost Everything. (That song is one of my favorites; I like the full sound of Teeth Dreams generally, but Almost Everything in particular has those round, ringing, liquid notes that manage somehow to suspend all the weight and the sadness that are in the story at that point in a deeply convincing way. Truly great.) The song begins: Something might happen but nothing will be never ending. Right from the start I told you I can't spend the night. Forget all the feelings. Remember the sessions. How we made a connection. With the lambs from my dreams looking up at your hands. And your hands pointing up at the lights. We recognize the "lambs from my dreams" from Stay Positive; the Narrator is the POV character (confirmed by the descriptions of the band's tour bus rolling into Franklin Ave. off I-94 from the east, and the lights coming up at shows). And he's talking to Mary, and talking about her hands. The image here is a deeply earnest one, and a religious one; the idea of Narrator in the band : kids at the shows :: shepherd : lambs is explicitly Biblical [John 21:15]: So when they had dined, Jesus saith to Simon Peter, Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me more than these? He saith unto him, Yea, Lord; thou knowest that I love thee. He saith unto him, Feed my lambs. So what is it about her hands, stretched upward toward the lights, that could make them the centerpiece of this scene of holy wonder? The answer is that they are bleeding, not from self-inflicted wounds, but from stigmata. (Have a look at the cover of Heaven is Whenever, too. That picture has a particular meaning in the context of the sequence of liner photos, but when you hold it up against these lines from Almost Everything, the suggestion of stigmata is really hard to escape.) Mary bleeds from holy wounds in her hands in moments of religious exaltation, especially when seeing her vision of Charlemagne as Christ. This is a very important element of the story, and we'll start working through some of the specific episodes tomorrow. But before wrapping up here, we have to stop for another look at the mappings. At the time Craig wrote the story (around 2004), there were three female Doctors of the Catholic Church: St. Theresa, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Therese of Lisieux. (A fourth has since been added, but let's focus on the ones we've got. Wikipedia has info on all of these.) St. Theresa we know about. St. Catherine is the foremost stigmatic among the female saints; Mary is identified with her because of the stigmata. St. Therese of Lisieux died of tuberculosis, and her religious writings often mention her cough; Mary is identified with her because of the cough. (In the story, the cough serves to show how Mary's body is being destroyed by her progress through the world of drugs. In high school, she has no cough; four years later, at the "first night" party, she's got a "nervous cough" [BBlues]; a few years after that, it's still a "nervous cough" [MM] but it "sounds awful" and "some nights it hurts to breathe" [CSunrise]; finally it turns into a full-blown "hacking cough" [A&H]. But it certainly looks like Craig's choice of a cough, rather than something else, to show this decline had something to do with reasons of metaphoric symmetry.) So Mary is mapped to all Three Marys *and* to all three female Doctors of the Church: Mary, mother of Jesus | Queen of Heaven (and more to come) | Mary Magdalene | unfulfilled love of Christ, red hair (and more to come) | Mary of Bethany | precognition | St. Theresa of Avila | visions, ecstasy of transverberation | St. Catherine of Siena | stigmata | St. Therese of Lisieux | cough |
There are of course a number of ways in which these actual Church figures overlap, especially in their ecstasies and mystic union with Christ; check out "Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy" and the "Transverberation of Saint Theresa" below (throwing in "The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena" and "Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata" for good measure; all these images are from their Wikipedia articles). But this is still kind of insane. Craig's bringing some serious skills to the table. Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy (Caravaggio) Transverberation of Saint Theresa (Bernini) The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine of Siena (Giovanni di Paolo) Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Stigmata (Beccafumi) Thank you for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 22, 2016 21:34:58 GMT -5
Thanks maaskesr! I appreciate the feedback, and I massively appreciate the prayer. I was thinking that tying up all the loose ends through Holly's party should help, since then I can give a finished account of the story to that point. Today I need to finish with Mary and Gideon as a couple. But after that I think I can do it in about a week: day 1) what's the story behind the wrists and bandages? day 2) wrap up loose ends re: Mary and the Narrator at prom day 3) get a few things out of Hostile Mass and Stevie Nix day 4) wrap up loose ends re: the "first night" party day 5) get a few things out of Cheyenne Sunrise day 6) wrap up loose ends re: the metal bar day 7) wrap up loose ends re: Holly's party Some of those might run long, but we'll see how it goes. Back to Gideon and Mary as an item. Gideon and Mary got together when the Narrator went off to school, and they were still together when he came back four years later. Gideon is with her at the "first night" party, when all the kids come together for the first time [Swish]: Ginger and Jack and four or five Feminax Psycho eyes and a stovepipe hat A ray of light in tight white rayon slacks We got cracked We already noted that the "psycho eyes" belong to Gideon; he's the guy "with the wild eyes when [he asks] to get you high" [HSL] at Holly's party, among other things. (There's other evidence that Gideon's eyes are "special" even when he's not out of his mind with the Skins, so I'm pretty sure this is a simple description of him at the party, not a jump to a later time.) We also noted that the "stovepipe hat" is part of his magician costume. The "ray of light in tight white rayon slacks" is Mary; it's characteristic of her to wear revealing white clothing, or indeed as little as possible (there are other examples coming in the next few days, but "St. Theresa showed up wearing see-thru / It was standard issue" [TSPotC] will do for now). "Ginger and Jack" is a double entendre; it's ginger ale and Jack Daniel's mixed to go with the Feminax, but it's also a reference to Mary and Gideon. 1) "Jack" = Gideon Way back at the beginning of these posts, we saw that "He had a painters cap, it said Panama Jack" [HM] was a description of Gideon after he'd been "jumped in" by the Skins (the flaps on the back of the cap kept the sun off his neck after he'd had his dreads shaved off ...). There are a few other references to "Jack" besides these two that are all about Gideon; one is "'Cause Jackie Onassis said that it ain't safe for Catholics yet" [DLME]. Don't Let Me Explode is an account of Holly being questioned about her and Gideon's movements together after they left her party; they didn't go to "Dallas" because Gideon said it wasn't safe. (We'll talk about the Dallas and Kennedy metaphors later, gotta stay on track here.) 2) "Ginger" = Mary Mary's an Irish Catholic girl and a redhead. The best confirmation of the Irish part is buried in the middle of a huge tangle a little later on, we just have to wait for it. But we've already talked extensively about her religious character, and her praying for specifically Catholic "indulgences" on behalf of Charlemagne in Both Crosses. As far as the redhead part goes, it's explicit in "Ginger," but also implicit in what's just about the most important metaphor in the story. We've already noted several times that Mary is in love with Charlemagne as her Christ. In this she is deliberately modeled on Mary Magdalene, whose unfulfilled, reciprocal love for Jesus is a major tradition of popular Christianity, most familiar from works like Kazantzakis' Last Temptation of Christ and Rilke's Pieta'. The eternally separated lovers of the "Dos Cruces" metaphor in Both Crosses are Charlemagne and Mary, again in their roles as Christ and Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is famously portrayed with red hair in Church iconography (see wikipedia on Mary Magdalene), and that's why our Mary has red hair too. ("That's why" in the same sense as "that's why Gideon always lives upstairs.") While on the subject of Mary Magdalene: there are actually Three Marys (see wikipedia on The Three Marys) in Western Christian tradition; and while there are different sets of three to whom the name is applied, the main ones are clearly: - Mary, Mother of Jesus and Queen of Heaven - Mary Magdalene - Mary of Bethany, sister of Lazarus and Martha We've already seen that our Mary is mapped to both Mary, Queen of Heaven [MN, SPositive, etc.] and Mary Magdalene [Swish, BCrosses, etc.]. But who's Mary of Bethany? She was the one who anointed Jesus' feet with costly perfume, and wiped them with her hair [John 12:1-8]; as is noted in her Wikipedia entry ( Mary of Bethany): So Mary in the THS story is identified with Mary of Bethany, too, by the fact that she foresees the death of Charlemagne. The visions as such are St. Theresa, but the precognition is Mary of Bethany. It's probably not too early for me to say here that Mary is the moral center of the THS story. Holly, Charlemagne, and the Narrator all take the spotlight at different times, but the whole narrative revolves around Mary. Already in the "first night" party of Swish and Barfruit Blues, we see that she's the one who brings them all together --- Gideon, her boyfriend at the time; Holly, her cousin; Charlemagne, her cousin's companion; and the Narrator, her prom date from high school whose band happened to be playing in the bar that night. On to the bandages tomorrow. Thanks for reading along. If you're feeling a particularly strong belief in miracles and can say a prayer for Stay Alive Carl, thank you very much for that too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 21, 2016 20:14:44 GMT -5
More about Gideon and Mary tomorrow, but in the meantime, a short one. We talked yesterday about "princess" Mary liking to hang out in the party pit with townies. So at this point there's no surprise in my saying that One for the Cutters is about Mary too. Though it's pretty obviously an account of Charlemagne's crucifixion, One for the Cutters seems at first listen to come from outside the main story. It's told in a remote, objective voice (like 40B or JaJ), and emphasizes aspects of the POV character that we don't readily recognize in any of the girls we know from the other songs. But once we realize that Mary is the "princess," and in particular that she's identified with Cherry from the Outsiders ("Diane Lane" [ABlues]), it's no longer a stretch to see that she's the POV character of the song. (In case anyone hasn't read/seen it, the Outsiders is the story of a group of working-class Greaser kids who get in a knife fight with upper-class Socs from the other side of the tracks; during the fight, Johnny, one of the Greasers, kills Bob, one of the Socs. Cherry, Bob's wealthy girlfriend, offers to support Johnny in court. The parallel with OftC is pretty hard to miss. Breaking Away, the movie from which the name "Cutters" is taken, has a similar plot line involving the conflict of townie kids and wealthy college students.) The Hold Steady wiki article on One for the Cutters ( link) records the following bit of lore: It's hard to know exactly what Craig said, or whether he was speaking tongue-in-cheek, but the song isn't really "about" Bloomington, any more than Milkcrate Mosh is about Denver. In fact, we can appeal to something else Craig said in clear support of One for the Cutters' place in the story, and for its location in Minnesota. The song begins [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 In the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link), Craig said: The "quarry/woods" where kids "drink" and "party" mentioned by Craig, and the "quarry/woods" where kids "drink" and "party" in One for the Cutters, are the same place. Which means that Charlemagne gets crucified at the Party Pit. Things really are getting simpler. Though the implication of the rest is that Mary takes Gideon's side after the fight, which adds a new twist. For maaskesr: I saw your question about Judas/Jesus and Both Crosses in the other thread. I don't know if you've read this far, but if you keep reading, I promise you'll get a complete answer. Before that, I need to use what we've learned about Mary to clean up most of the loose ends left laying around. But we'll get to the crucifixion, and it'll make more sense if we get through the events leading up to it first. I hope this is starting to get a bit fun, anyway. Thank you for reading along, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 20, 2016 21:17:44 GMT -5
Now things get interesting. If Mary is the precog girl, and is identifiable by all of these characteristics, we're suddenly in a place where almost every song we listen to has new oh-shit moments attached to it. So we're just going to run around for a while and collect them. (And again, this is how The Test gets applied: the more this hypothesis explains in a clear and satisfying way, the stronger it becomes. We'll get to the problematic claims about Holly and Jesse's visions [CatCT, CF] before too long, too.)
Let's start with one from the Weekenders (which, if our account of the metal bar / reservoir symmetry is correct, comes late in the story, after the crucifixion). Looking back, Charlemagne says to Mary:
I'm pretty sure I wasn't your first choice. I think I was the last one remaining.
We've seen that Mary wants Charlemagne, that she sees him as her Christ [Weekenders, BCrosses, YS]. But there was a time in high school when she was with the Narrator [PP, MN, and we think YGD too]. That squares with what Charlemagne's saying here, as far as it goes.
But what he actually says is "last one remaining," which strongly implies not "second," but "last of all, the last of at least three."
The obvious inference --- which fits with our earlier hypothesis that, for the purposes of the story, there are only three male characters, the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon --- is that she's been with Gideon too.
Back to the opening of the Party Pit. There, the Narrator says:
I guess I met her at the party pit She said those kids she's with were selling it So we sailed off on some separate trips She got pinned down at the party pit
I went away to school that fall She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls
He met Mary for the first time in high school, at the Party Pit (again, we know it's high school from the next verse). She was there with kids selling drugs --- not the bougie guys from school, but the townies, like Gideon. They hit it off and went to prom together, but something went wrong and they "sailed off on some separate trips." Then the Narrator went away to school (Sept 1989), while Mary stuck around with the townie kids shooting speed. (I'm pretty sure "stickpin dolls" are "speed shooters" [SM]; "stickpin" = stuck with a needle and "pinned," which as we've already discussed means "high in a not-entirely-good way" [CT, FB].)
It was shortly after this that Gideon made his move, and gave her a formal introduction to this world of harder stuff. This is the story told in A Slight Discomfort.
I won't comment on the whole song here, just the parts that are essential to Mary's progression from the Narrator to Gideon. Gideon, the POV character, opens (in his normal voice --- this is years before he got jumped in and lost his mind) by saying:
I thought you're through with all the bougie guys. Don't you wonder about the other side? They only get invited because they think that they might buy.
This perfectly matches the opening verse of Party Pit. Mary, getting away from her princess high school, had started hanging out in the party pit with the kids who were "selling it," when the Narrator came along. Gideon's been watching her, and is surprised that she went with him: "I thought you're through with all the bougie guys," he says --- those upper-class kids who only get invited to the party pit parties by the townies, because "they think that they might buy."
A lot of revealing info about Gideon himself follows, but we'll pick that up later. He continues about Mary:
And you say you're a princess. But I remain unconvinced. I've seen the guys that you've been with. They don't seem much like princes.
And you say you're much better. But I don't quite believe it. I saw the girls that you came with. I saw the guy that you left with.
We note the confirmation that Mary is indeed the "princess" precog girl [A&H,ABlues, YGD]. The guys that she's "been with" are the "bougie guys"; the girls that she "came with" are the other upper-class girls from her high school; the guy that she "left with" is the Narrator. She's told him that she's much better than those kids, but Gideon doesn't buy it.
The next couple of verses about Jesus and prayer will make sense later, after we break down a few other things. Finally, the song ends with Gideon introducing her to the needle, and to serious speed for the first time:
This shouldn't hurt. But you might feel a slight discomfort.
There's lots more to be said about Mary and Gideon together, about Mary and the Narrator together, and about A Slight Discomfort, but we have to do a bit at a time.
Thanks for reading. Still Alive Carl is still alive, so thanks for your prayers, too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 19, 2016 21:36:47 GMT -5
OK, picking up where we left off:
If we're feeling good about the girl of YS being the same as the ones of CSunrise and TSPotC respectively, then we want to look at those songs in turn and see what they link to. In this case, the easiest links to follow are the bandaged hand and cough of CSunrise.
Start with the bandaged hand. Girls with hand/wrist bandages show up in a lot of songs:
- "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I came to bandage up my hand" [CSunrise] - "Nine stitches and bandages ... So keep your bandages clean" [SS] - "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD] - "Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists" [SK]
That Arms and Hearts quote with *both* hands *and* cough is obviously a very strong link, so let's start there. We already established that the speaker and POV character in A&H is Charlemagne, as established by the reference to Gideon burning "a hole in me." About "you," the girl in A&H, we learn that she:
30) is putting off Charlemagne; she won't go out with him despite his "positivity" 31) claims to be a princess 32) has bandaged hands and a hacking cough 33) is "kissing [Charlemagne] in the center" while the band played "Ice Cream Castles" 34) is awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet
In #34 "awkward" there's a weak link to CSunrise "awkward"; but there are two far more important connections here:
She's putting off Charlemagne, who wants to "go out with" her: #30 [A&H], #6 [YS] She claims to be a princess: #31 [A&H], "I got stuck with some priss that went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD]
Without even looking further at You Gotta Dance, we see that it brings the princess *and* bandaged wrists connections full circle. That's a nice confirmation.
And two elements of A&H, #30 "maybe now you might go out with me / 'Cause I got so much positivity" and #34 "ascending into heaven," make a strong double link to Ascension Blues, where the girl says to Charlemagne (identified by "positive"):
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
The Ascension Blues girl is thinking about ascending into heaven, like the one in Arms and Hearts. She's putting off Charlemagne in spite of his positivity, again like the one in Arms and Hearts. So this song too warrants a closer look. The Ascension Blues girl:
40) is sick of all the sucking up, again suggesting prostitution 41) is terrified of coming down, i.e. is drug-addicted 42) describes what seems to be a vision, and notes in a separate but insistent way that she's seen things on television 43) is referred to as "Diane Lane" of the films Outsiders and Rumble Fish; the implicit identification is with Cherry from the Outsiders, that is, a princess 44) has Charlemagne around, still trying to figure out if she felt anything 45) is religious 46) is again putting off Charlemagne despite positivity 47) makes an allusion to the sweet part of the city
Now we're seriously getting somewhere; there are strong links from every one of these points back to every song we've been looking at along the way, including the other explicitly precog-girl songs Chips Ahoy!, Both Crosses, and Weekenders:
She's involved in what appears to be prostitution: #16 [CSunrise], #40 [ABlues] She's an addict: #11, #14 [CSunrise], #41 [ABlues]; lots of suggestion of drug use in TSPotC too She has visions: #2 [YS], #18 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC], #42 [ABlues]; obvious links to CA, BCrosses, Weekenders also She's a princess: #31 [A&H], #43 [ABlues], and the YGD line too She's earnestly religious: #1 [YS], #19 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC], #45 [ABlues], obviously BCrosses also She's putting off Charlemagne: #6 [YS], #30 [A&H], #44, #46 [ABlues], obviously CA also She's associated with the sweet part of the city: #47 [ABlues] and TSPotC generally
We never got back to the cough, but this is a regular motif too:
- "She had a confident smile and a nervous cough" [BBlues] - "Nervous cough, nervous cough, nervous cough and now we're off" [MM] - "Bandaged hands and your hacking cough" [A&H] - "I've been mostly dying and I've been mostly coughing" [BCrosses] - "I know my cough sounds awful" [CSunrise]
The quotes from CSunrise, BCrosses, and A&H tie right into the heart of the group of songs we've been looking at. The precog girl has a cough on top of everything else.
That's a big network of links, and we're not finished chasing down the ends yet. But it's already led us to a couple of quiet points which add up to something big.
The precog girl likes margaritas [CSunrise] and has a cough [CSunrise, BCrosses, A&H]. That's Mary of Barfruit Blues:
Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix
She licked her lower lip and then she kissed that Halleluiah chick She came off kind of spicy but she tasted like those pickle chips Thought she was a dancer but her steps they made the records skip She came off kind of crunchy but she went down like a chicken strip
Dripping wet with the special sauce She had a confident smile and a nervous cough And we got off
Even if we discount "dripping wet" [A&H] as a link, we already have a number of other indications that this is right:
- One is that, in The Weekenders, the precog girl is addressed as "you," while Holly, hostess of the Industrial Age party, is "she" by way of distinction (and again, Holly's party predates Jesse's appearance on the scene). - Another is that the girl in You Gotta Dance is clearly the Narrator's high-school-dance date, and the only girl fitting that description we know is Mary. We still don't know exactly what went wrong at the end of Massive Nights, or how that could translate to getting "stuck with some priss who went and sliced up her wrists" [YGD], but there are certainly suggestions of suicide at the end of Massive Nights too ("she had the gun in her mouth"), with the implication that this is related to her "dreams" [MN].
We're onto something now, and we'll see more confirmation as we start chasing down the details.
As for the Sapphire question, for the time being we can formulate it in a new way. The POV character of Yeah Sapphire is Mary, hearing herself addressed by Charlemagne in her vision/dream. What we really need to work out is why she hears him calling her "Sapphire" and not "Mary." The answer is complicated; it's not just that he's using another name. But there is an answer, and we're getting closer to it.
Thanks as always for reading; if you enjoyed any moment of aha or recognition in this, and can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl, I would be super grateful.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 18, 2016 22:54:58 GMT -5
Thanks John, I will definitely check that out.
I'm running short of time today, so let me try to keep this one from going too far.
The first time I had to start writing things down was when I first tried to work out the "who's where when" problem, before I realized that most place names are metaphors, and that most of the action takes place in the Twin Cities.
The second time was here, when I started to look seriously at the precog girl problem. Since most of the questions come back to Sapphire, I figured the best thing was to start with Yeah Sapphire!, write down all the identifying information we think we get from that song, and then follow the links from there to other songs.
Here's what I originally came up with. From YS, it appears that Sapphire:
1) is devoutly religious 2) has precognition/dreams/visions 3) foresaw the stabbing of Charlemagne (who is identified by "big sketchy mess ... almost killed me") 4) has been to "Sacramento" with him 5) has "touched" with him in the past, and has suffered some kind of physical violence as a result 6) won't let him touch her now; nevertheless dreams of him coming to her with love and gratitude 7) "left" before he almost got killed 8) is apparently in "Cheyenne" --- possibly the real Cheyenne --- or else Charlemagne wants to take her there 9) is associated with the horse motif
Several of the above items are deliberate misdirection on Craig's part, or at any rate are aspects of major plot complications that would throw us off if we sat down to explain them all at once. But if we're just taking them as optional identifiers, we don't have to worry about any of that --- all we care about is matching them up with other identifiers of female characters found in other songs.
The first and easiest link to follow is the "Cheyenne" link, which leads to Cheyenne Sunrise and The Sweet Part of the City.
We've already proposed that the POV character of Cheyenne Sunrise is in fact the precog girl, thanks to her prediction of the sketchy "killer party." But looking at the whole song, we see that this girl:
10) also "left" (for how long is not clear; also not fully clear where her "home" is) 11) was held back by "first Al Green / And then Barry White," which seems clearly to be an allusion to margaritas and then some harder, white-colored drug (can't say for sure if it's cocaine/snow/white pony, or heroin/white horse, or meth/ice; but it's probably one of those). The reference to margaritas as "green," and as having power to seduce in analogy with the music of Al Green and Barry White, is explicit in 212-MARGARITA ("I believe in salt along the rims of the glasses / 'Cause that makes us thirsty / And when we drink / Then we all fall in love" [212M]). 12) has an injured hand, needs a bandage 13) is refusing to get into a fight with someone at home 14) describes the perils of the Scene as they're trying to get high (tipping over in the taprooms/ living for the one sweet fleeting feeling) 15) has an awful cough 16) does her business on the street, apparently prostitution 17) sees a "Cheyenne sunrise" and notices that things are changing, that they're getting older 18) predicts sketchy violence at the other person's next party 19) comments on the sorry Christianity of the Skins
The Sweet Part of the City gives us a little more; she
20) is called St. Theresa, with reference both to her visions and to her religious inclination 21) is wearing "standard issue" "see-thru" 22) drinks wine 23) is associated with both "Cheyenne" and "Sacramento" somehow
All three songs have suggestions of addiction and prostitution and domestic violence in common, none of them quite strong enough to stand on, but definitely giving the impression of a single portrait. The other links are stronger:
She "left": #7 [YS], #10 [CSunrise] She has predictive visions: #2, #3 [YS], #18 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC] She's associated with Cheyenne: #8 [YS], #17 [CSunrise], #23 [TSPotC] She's associated with Sacramento: #4 [YS], #23 [TSPotC] She's earnestly religious: #1 [YS], #19 [CSunrise], #20 [TSPotC]
As it happens, two of these links are an illusion: the "left" of #10 [CSunrise] and the "left" of #7 [YS] refer to two completely different episodes, and the "Sacramento" connection doesn't really support the argument we're trying to make here. But I didn't know that when I first made these lists. And the fact is that the other links, which are the most important ones, do hold up. So, either way, the case for identifying the POV girl in CSunrise and "St. Theresa" of TSPotC with Sapphire is looking pretty good.
It's probably clear where this is going but I'm running out of time for tonight so let me call a halt there. Will pick this up where I left off tomorrow.
Thank you for sticking with me this far, and for your prayers for Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 17, 2016 12:30:10 GMT -5
For the last round of this, just a few more things we want to tie up: 1) sketchy In the songs, "sketchy" always refers to the "harbor bars" area on the East Side of St. Paul, and often specifically to the night of the Payne Avenue beatdown [SM, BCamp, YS, CSunrise, BBreathing, OwtB]. We saw this already with "Sketchy Metal" [SM], "It got pretty sketchy" [BBreathing], and in the immediate aftermath with "Now all our friends are acting / Sketchy and lifeless" [OwtB]. That "harbor" area, where "it gets sketchy in the night" [BCamp], is also the location of the "camps down by the banks of the river" [BCamp]. I'm sure everyone's seen the awesome "Hold Steady in the Twin Cities" map ( link), which helped me out a lot in the early going. We'll do our own overview of the geography pretty soon, since there are a lot of things that we can usefully add to the picture. 2) bar/club Going on a Hike describes the kids' continuing quest to get high in pretty colorful terms: "almost every night" they climb up to the "mountains" to get high, only when they come down they sometimes end up "dying down in cliche canyon," where "there's blood down in the valleys" [GoaH]. The song ends with a further description of what we recognize as the bar on Payne Avenue: 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 We have the "killer parties" that "almost killed me" [KP] taking place in a "rock and roll club" [GoaH]. This is the first time we've looked at a description that actually used both the words "bar" and "club," but we already understood that, even if it's not really a strip club like the Payne Reliever, it's not a bar in the ordinary sense of the word. There's alcohol there but it's mainly about the shows and the drugs and the "light [shining] through behind the reinforced doorways" [SM]. Nor is this the only description of the place that uses both the terms "bar" and "club" [Ambassador]: A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club. It was called The Ambassador We're coming full circle now: the Ambassador, the club not the song, is the Payne Avenue bar where Charlemagne got almost killed. In that song, too, it's described as a hotbed of skinheads; besides the fact that "the halls smelled like burning hair" (they keep their heads trimmed and burn the trimmings afterward), the guys there are the same ones "you'd recognize" [Ambassador]: 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. The language in Sweet Payne is identical, right down to the "blood on the bed" [SPayne]: A shaved head and the blood on the bed And those guys you recognize, they got the same tattoos as Gideon We still don't know what the business about the bed is. But we've definitely identified the locale. 3) metal bar Having paid some attention to the "metal" angle, we have no problem understanding that the "metal bar" of Weekenders is yet another reference to the Payne Avenue beatdown. The POV character here is talking to the precog girl, and says [Weekenders]: There was that whole weird thing with the horses. ... 'Cause I was thinking we could pull another weekender. If you've still got a little bit of clairvoyance. I remember the metal bar. I remember the reservoir. You could say our paths have crossed before. What do those last three lines mean? There's a major aha here, but to get it we have to put a few things together: - We've speculated that Charlemagne is the POV character here for a number of reasons. As we saw in Both Crosses, the precog girl is in love with him, and that squares with "if you swear to keep it decent" [Weekenders]. He doesn't just live off women's money occasionally [MINTS, C&N, etc.], the fact that he does is a real character trait, and one of the things on which the Christ parallel is built. The comments on Holly's party ("train wreck" etc.) seem to come from his perspective. We're pretty sure this is Charlemagne talking. - In these lines, it's at least clear that he's remembering key moments of shared experience with the precog girl. - One of the clearest things we know about Charlemagne's relationship with the precog girl is that she foresaw his crucifixion, and that she did something to save him or to try to save him from it [BCrosses, YS]. And the three lines here are preceded by a long verse in which Charlemagne muses about her clairvoyance. - We also have a clear idea that Charlemagne's story pivots on two critical episodes: the Payne Avenue beatdown, and the crucifixion. Now, the "metal bar" is definitely a reference to the Payne Avenue beatdown. We've already seen a lot of cases of meaningful symmetry in the way things are presented in the songs. If there's a second episode that goes with the "metal bar" in an overview of Charlemagne's experiences, it's likely to be the crucifixion. (And if the evidence of Yeah Sapphire! is a reliable guide, he survived it; which means that there is a reading in which it can be part of a retrospective, too.) When Charlemagne says "you could say our paths have crossed before," why does he hedge it with "you could say"? That's as much as to say that their paths didn't really cross, or that they crossed in some way that wasn't strictly literal. Well, he's just been talking about her clairvoyance. And we know that she foresaw the crucifixion. Under the circumstances, it is hard not to conclude that he means that their "paths crossed" in her visions. In other words, he's saying that she foresaw *both* the metal bar *and* the crucifixion. If this reading is right, we would expect to see evidence that the precog girl foresaw the metal bar beatdown. And thanks to our observations about "sketchy" above, we've got it. In Cheyenne Sunrise, we have: Onward Christian Soldiers We're gonna bash right through your borders I bet your next party gets sketchy I saw the new kids nodding off "Onward Christian Soldiers" is a reference to the Skins; in Look Alive, after talking about Shepard and his crew dressed in cowboy gear, the POV character says of them: They hang up at the Methodist So hard to be a Christian soldier there "Methodist" is Park Nicollet Methodist Hospital, which is where the Skins are "maxing out their medicine" [SPayne]; the "Onward Christian Soliders" quip is a reference to the hymn and the Methodist founding of the hospital. The Skins seem to have adopted the sentiment to their ideology in a rather particular sense. (More on this when we get back to the geographical overview.) The rest is all familiar: - "bash right through your borders": bashing out his brains [SPayne] - "I saw the new kids nodding off": slumping over smiling [SPayne] - "next party gets sketchy": killer parties, sketchy [BBreathing, GoaH, KP, SM, etc.] So there's the evidence we want, right there: "your next party ... I saw" [CSunrise]. The precog girl is the POV character of Cheyenne Sunrise, and she saw the beatdown before it happened, too. Of course the other thing we have to figure out, if we want this to stand up, is what in the world "the reservoir" has to do with the crucifixion. But that's looking like a good line of investigation at this point. I remember when this clicked, and remember thinking that I really couldn't put off working out the story precog girl any longer. That's where we are now too. More on her next. That was a long trip through the details of the beatdown, but I hope the payoff was worth it to whoever's reading along. Thanks for sticking with it, and thank you as always if you can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl along the way.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 16, 2016 17:35:10 GMT -5
Thank you Luke, I really appreciate the help. I'm glad to know this is resonating, too. Back to that last sentence from the Cloak and Dagger interview ( link) one more time: That "metal" thing kind of sticks out. The Payne Reliever is long since gone, but a little googling suggests that lots of acts played there, not just metal bands, and an all-metal strip club seems like a funny thing anyway. What's that all about? Well, Craig's having a little fun; "metal" in the THS world is another double entendre, this one for "metal" in the sense of music generally, and "metal" in the sense of "silver metal flake" [R&T], which is the "strong stuff" [SPayne] that the Skins gave to the kids when they "[got them] high." (By the way, I should apologize for beating the words "double entendre" and "metaphor" to death. I'm sure there are proper terms for all these things in different contexts, but I don't know them, and trying to keep up with Craig's bag of tricks is enough of a challenge already without having to classify them, too. Basically, if one word is used to point to two things, I'm calling it double entendre. And if two different names are used to refer to one thing, I'm calling it a metaphor. Hope that works.) So now we can get back to those verses we skipped in Sketchy Metal: Went through a skater phase Went through a raver phase I went through a razor blade phase I guess I went through a hundred dollars a day It was dark along the edges of the city But the light shined through behind the reinforced doorways They're tipping over in the taprooms They're shooting through the ceiling and they're bleeding on the floor And yeah, for sure we got dosed We hung out pretty close with some questionable folks We got ideas from some dangerous thinkers We put our mouths up to some dangerous drinks Some nights we almost froze But we rubbed up pretty close to some rock and roll promoters Stayed up pretty late with some rock and roll performers It's always entertaining when you're hanging out with entertainers This is the Narrator talking about the years after he came back from school up until the time he met Jesse, with a detailed nod to the Payne Avenue beatdown in the middle. The first verse "Went through a skater phase ... hundred dollars a day" describes his descent into serious drug addiction over this time. There are other allusions to this framing, like "We were living up at Nicollet and 66th / With three skaters and some hoodrat chick" [HH], but we'll come back to that later. The second verse is a description of the Payne Avenue beatdown: - "edges of the city" = the "East Side [of] St. Paul" [SPayne]. - "reinforced doorways" = sketchy nighttime parties in bars that are more clubs than bars - "taprooms" = "taverns" [OwtB], the Payne Avenue bar - "tipping over" = Charlemagne down on the floor, "slumping over" [SPayne] - "shooting through the ceiling" = speed shooting (metal), "sailing off with cherubim" [SPayne] - "bleeding on the floor" = Charlemagne "cut up with the motorcycle chains" [SPayne], "left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH] - "we got dosed" = "said they'd get us high" [SPayne]; & second sense: we got beat up [BBreathing] The third and fourth verses pan out from there to talk about the Skins and the scene over the next few years: - "questionable folks" = Skins - "ideas from some dangerous thinkers" = "I guess Shepard came out of St. Cloud with a little ideology / Some new way of thinking, man" [IHTWTDFY] - "rock and roll" etc. = "For me, it was mostly the music / A crew to go to the shows with" [IHTWTDFY] Those last bits (in SM and IHTWTDFY both) show that, despite the experience of getting beat up, the Narrator and the others are still frequenting the scene with the music and the drugs, and still rubbing shoulders with the Skins. We've got a much clearer idea now what Charlemagne's worried about when it comes to Jesse. The "harbor bars" of Certain Songs and Hurricane J *are* the "taverns" [OwtB] and "taprooms" [SM] of St. Paul; Payne Avenue ends in the area of the Harbor of St. Paul (see for example link). There are Skins among the "guys along the harbor bars" [CSongs]. She gets with the music boys to provoke him [40B] because they're in the same crowd as those "kids [that] don't seem positive," the "boys that you met at the harbor" [HJ]. When he tells her those boys are "too hard already" and will "only get harder," he's thinking of Gideon the gangster Skin, who wanted to be "hard" [Knuckles] and got Holly hooked on meth. Charlemagne's got Jesse off the speed and cleaned up [SM]; his concern now is to keep her from going the same route that Holly went ("But twenty-two and banging around in restaurants / Isn't that much prettier than banging around in bars" [HJ, compare MINTS]). She knows that's what's on his mind, and knows how to make him worried. Given all that, an obvious question is: why doesn't Charlemagne leave with Jesse for New York, to get her away from the perils of the scene? In Certain Songs, we see him trying to persuade her that the East Coast is the paradise she's looking for (a "certain perfect ratio" [CSongs]); he definitely wants her out of St. Paul. And in Magazines, we know that she's threatening to go to New York without him ("New York gets pretty heavy, girl, I hope it doesn't crush you" [Magazines]), though the fact that she doesn't go, and that she later says she's waiting for him [CF], make it pretty clear that she won't go without him, that she's threatening to leave just to try to get him to "chase her to the lights" [Magazines]. In Spinners, we find out that she eventually does go to New York (see "She's two years off some prairie town" and "inbound trains" [Spinners]). So why doesn't he just pack up and go with her, especially since he's got no shortage of trouble in the Twin Cities himself? There's a reason for that, which we're getting to. One more pass along Payne Avenue tomorrow, then we start tunneling into the "spooky stuff" at the heart of the story. Bless you for reading, and for thinking of Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 15, 2016 13:21:52 GMT -5
Sweet Payne is vague about where Charlemagne and the others met with the Skins; all it tells us is that it's on "Payne Avenue" on the "East Side" of "St. Paul," in a place with a "basement" and a "bed." Teeth Dreams gives us some important additional detail: Runner's High adds that it has a "vestibule," and On with the Business locates it among the "taverns." The 2004 Cloak and Dagger quote we pulled up earlier ( link) squares with this: The first two sentences above map more or less word for word to the lyrics of Sweet Payne, no new info there: - "Payne Avenue": Payne Ave. - "East Side": East Side - "St. Paul": St. Paul - "seemed sane in the day": nice family area during the day - "but some nights it seems depressed and deranged": a little sinister at night - "the cityscape skins are kinda kicking it again": hotbed of activity for racist skinheads But then we come to the last sentence: There's a reasonable amount lurking in this sentence. First, it suggests that the beatdown happened in a bar, which fits with "taverns" [OwtB]. The plural "taverns" suggests that we're not actually talking about the Payne Reliever, but it's one of the bars on Payne Avenue, something on that model. It's not just an ordinary bar, either; it's a bar with music (and maybe other stuff going on that can explain "bed," too [SPayne]). The music part would explain "basement"; basement shows, like those at the "Dead End Alley" [CSTLN], were a fixture of the Twin Cities scene. And as it happens we have another account of the "almost killed me" beatdown that backs up the music angle, namely Barely Breathing. In the first two verses (I've added quotation marks for the direct quotes), we get: "You should have seen them just after midnight. When they were down on their luck. And still high from the street fight." Talking like it wasn't really much of a big thing. To be out on the tiles and barely breathing. We were barely breathing. "Showing up at shows like you care about the scene still. Where were you when the blood spilled? They almost killed me." It got pretty sketchy. We tried to push forward. Now we're pointing at the scoreboard And it feels so amazing. And the crowd's going crazy. The references to 1988 Minneapolis etc. in the third verse show that the POV character in Barely Breathing is the Narrator. But the song opens with a direct quote from Charlemagne, talking to someone who wasn't there when the beatdown happened. As in Southtown Girls and On with the Business, Charlemagne's trying to be businesslike, to play it cool about having been beaten to shit. (The Skins, we find out, had showed up at the bar after getting bested in a street fight, and were more than ready to take it all out on a provoking target.) Hearing him, the Narrator thinks the same thing: You're telling it like it was no big deal, to be "out on the tiles" (a double entendre like "bash," meaning both "out on the town" partying in the Led Zeppelin III sense, and literally "laid out on the pavement" post-beating) and barely breathing. And with the "We" of "we were barely breathing" the Narrator confirms that he too got beat up, though not as badly as Charlemagne ("Kids are getting cut up with the motorcycle chains" and "They're gonna show these kids some discipline" [SPayne] both have "kids" plural). But suddenly the cool attitude cracks, and we understand that Charlemagne is upset after all, upset with the person he's talking to: "Showing up at shows like you care about the scene still. Where were you when the blood spilled? They almost killed me." The identity of this person and the answer to Charlemagne's question are pointed to by two things, namely, the "Where were you?" recrimination itself, and the description of the beating in the next verse. Again: It got pretty sketchy. We tried to push forward. Now we're pointing at the scoreboard And it feels so amazing. And the crowd's going crazy. Here the Narrator is taking the whole episode for a metaphoric ride, describing the regular bar/basement show (see "violent shows" later in the song) as a stadium show turned into a sporting event (see also "stadium seating" [SA]): the crowd's going crazy, pointing at the scoreboard as the Skins "run up the score" on Charlemagne (see "Running up the score and stocking up like it's World War IV" [IHTWTDFY], "Tell her we ain't even keeping score no more" [AHFA]). This isn't the first time we've seen the Skins, stadium shows, and an accusatory "Where were you?" linked together. In Curves and Nerves, right after Holly tells her phone-answering friend to give Charlemagne the brush-off, we get: When the crowd went wild we were under the stands Mouths and hands, hands and mouths So many shows where nobody comes out "Where were you when the call came in?" "I was on a Rocky Mountain freedom binge With all the living members of the Cityscape Skins You and me and Gideon" The implication is that "when the crowd went wild" --- that is, when Charlemagne was getting beat up ("crowd's going crazy" [BBreathing]) --- Holly and her friend were "under the stands" using their "mouths and hands" to do some favors for a bunch of guys (who, under the circumstances, and apparently this happens a lot, never ended up actually going out to the show). So it's Holly whom Charlemagne is accusing with "Where were you when the blood spilled?" [BBreathing]. Unfortunately for his angry stance, the answer to his question is that she was out turning tricks, like she'd been doing all along to cover for his fuckups. Then he gets asked in his turn, "Where were you when the call came in?" [C&N] --- meaning, where were you when that "kid from California" [MINTS] called up Holly to invite her out to be in films, and she took off? His answer is that he was out getting high ("Rocky Mountain freedom binge" [C&N]) with "all the living members of the Cityscape Skins / You and me and Gideon"; that is, he and the others were at the Payne Avenue bar, where the Skins "[got them] high," "but that changed" [SPayne], and they almost killed him. ("All the living members" of the Skins are the ones who survived the bad-luck "street fight" of Barely Breathing. "You" is the Narrator, who's being quoted asking the question; we already know he was there. Gideon was there too, and we'll see more evidence of that later.) In both exchanges, Charlemagne's blaming Holly for not being around when he almost got killed; in both he comes off looking like an ass. Meanwhile, the Payne Avenue bar is established as a place where there's music / "violent shows" [BBreathing]. Still more on the bar and the Cloak and Dagger quote to come. There are a bunch of these "elliptical" descriptions that are all just talking about the same place and/or the same beatdown, and the more of them we can parse, the simpler the picture becomes. We're getting there. Thank you, always, for reading, and for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 14, 2016 13:22:20 GMT -5
Eric, thank you, this is great. There's only one song that I haven't been able to find some version of to listen to, and that's Teenage Liberation; I'll follow your pointer here and see if I can locate it. (I assume that Gideon's Conversion was a working title for a song that we now know by another name, otherwise that's another I haven't heard, or seen the lyrics to for that matter.) Of course I bought all the officially released albums but I know the band's main income comes from shows, which is another major reason to get out and see them if they tour again. That's a priority for me regardless.
About not looking too hard for a story, I get you, that's totally cool. If people think I'm seeing what isn't there, but can say a prayer for Still Alive Carl anyway, that's a fantastic outcome for me. I mean, I'm not trolling anyone; I believe what I'm writing here, and believe that it comes together in a really satisfying narrative (and maybe that'll appear better when I've summed it up and people can work back through the evidence from the end, I don't know). But my being right or wrong about that doesn't much matter in the big picture.
I've seen the T-shirt guy a couple of times since then but I haven't approached him. I know this is magical thinking or whatever, but it's like things with my friend are in a bubble, and I don't want to touch it. Maybe there'll come a time when that'll change. If I ever do see the guy at a show I'm buying him a beer, though, even if I can't tell him the whole story.
Anyway, thanks, seriously.
Picking up where I left off: in talking about the MAGNET interview quote,
I forgot to throw in the THS dealer=Savior metaphor. So that's a 4x mapping of Charlemagne to Christ, "pimp," "purple suit," "second generation," and "drug dealer," all at the same time. Craig's having a lot of fun with this.
I want to pull together a larger slice of the story today, tracing the background of Charlemagne's "scourging" through Sweet Payne, Southtown Girls and On with the Business.
Again, in Sweet Payne, Charlemagne gets very badly beaten ("left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH]).
In Southtown Girls, the fact that the guy on the other end of the deal says:
Hey Bloomington, what'd you let them do to you? Now I think they're almost through with you
tips us off to the fact that the POV character is Charlemagne, showing signs of having been beat half to death, and looking for a new source after the Skins have "cut off supplies" [OwtB]. Southtown Girls follows shortly after Sweet Payne, in other words, and foreshadows the worse handling to come in his eventual crucifixion.
And On with the Business opens with the following lines:
Let's get on with the business. I'm really sorry about that prick in the parking lot. I wanted this to be our year.
So, the "prick in the parking lot" is the dealer they met in Southtown Girls; the POV character is again Charlemagne, trying to put a brave face on his relentlessly small-time failure in front of the two friends ("I'm a little bit surprised, you didn't tell me there'd be three of you" [SG]) who've stuck it out with him thus far. Who these friends are and why they're there is important, but for the moment let's just focus on Charlemagne's own account of what's got them there:
First, he entered into a deal with the Skins to sell some of their merch for them (that's the Skins' business [Knuckles, SN, SS]).
Next, some bad luck (though you can't call it bad luck if you go looking for trouble, which is the point of saying that you gotta dance with who you came to the dance with) [YGD]:
Say a prayer for sweet Charlemagne. He had the pigs at the door. He put the drugs down the drain. He's gonna have to come up with seven grand some other way.
The "other way" turns out to be by letting Holly earn it back for him in exchange for drugs (he takes the money, and deals with the dealers in exchange). We get this in BBlues:
Holly can't speak, she don't feel all that sweet About the places she sometimes has to go to get some sleep She said "I'm sorry, people think I'm pretty."
and in Swish:
Swishing though the City Center I did a couple favors for these guys who looked like Tusken Raiders
and in Curves and Nerves, where "Geppetto" is Charlemagne, her string-pulling pimp and her supplier:
She said: "Hey if that's Geppetto tell that puppeteer that I ain't here yet ... And if he wants to buy me some I'll be in the kitchenette"
His idea is that he's going to pay back the Skins with her earnings, so that he can keep the supply coming, and keep his "business" afloat. But she gets tired of his exploitation and the increasingly ineffective stuff he's giving her ("Dead receptors" [OwtB; see MM]), and leaves for California [C&N]:
Charlemagne ... didn't really fit the plans she made
Now Charlemagne is really in trouble [MINTS]:
You left me fifty bucks and nothing much to do but think about getting back at you.
He's got no easy money now, and when he stops making payments, the Skins send a warning [OwtB]:
But they cut off supplies and they sent over some guys. And those guys they made it perfectly clear.
He gets the message, but then the phone gets disconnected [OwtB]:
They disconnected the phone last week. That's how we lost the connection
meaning that he can no longer contact them (the all-important phone connection, see "St. Paul had it all when we called" [SPayne]; "Sapphire, if St. Paul don't call" [YS]). Things are dangerous now, but because he thinks he's a born big-timer ("I only bow down to the jetset / They move so quick we haven't met yet" [ABlues]), he decides to go down in person to let them know it's under control [OwtB]:
So we went down to the taverns And tried to make an impression.
Of course the Skins aren't having any of his small-timer crap [OwtB]:
I said a couple things that probably weren't technically true. ... I know I made them a promise but those are just words. And words can get weird. I think they made themselves perfectly clear.
which is to say that they beat the crap out of him [OwtB]:
Blood on the carpet Mud on the mattress ...
where "blood on the carpet" brings us full circle to "cut up with the motorcycle chains" [SPayne] and "left to bleed to death in the vestibule" [RH]. So there's the full background to the beatdown.
More on the "taverns" and the Cloak and Dagger quote about the Payne Reliever tomorrow.
Thanks all again for reading, and thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 13, 2016 12:46:54 GMT -5
Let's get back to Charlemagne for a short series of things centered around Sweet Payne. (Sorry for jumping around, but this is how it really went: a little aha here, another one there, slow tunneling in from all sides.) From the Hold Steady Plot Chronology and other discussions it's clear that most folks are in agreement about the basic facts of Charlemagne's troubles. He gets almost killed once, as chronicled in Sweet Payne, and later gets crucified, as chronicled in Both Crosses. There are plenty of questions around the outcome of the crucifixion, but I'm pretty sure no one doubts that it happened, or that these are the two fundamental life-or-death episodes in his story. Thanks especially to Both Crosses, the different terms used to describe the crucifixion are clearly linked together: Charlemagne was crucified, stabbed, penetrated, punctured, etc. Physically, there are two main grounds for drawing this link. The first is Charlemagne's Christlike posture, per the brief description from Saddle Shoes: 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 The second is the fact of his being stabbed in the side, as when Christ was stabbed in the side during his crucifixion [John 19:34]: She saw the angel put a sword in his side Of course Christ was stabbed with a spear, not a sword, and by a soldier, not an angel. Craig, knowing that he's got the crucifixion angle sewn up, isn't missing an opportunity to pack in extra layers of meaning here. Gideon is called an "angel" in part because of the link to the plagues of Egypt in CatCT: He said I got through the part about the exodus And up to then I only knew it was a movement of the people But if small town cops are like swarms of flies and blackened foil is like boils and hail I'm pretty sure I've been through this before The tenth and final plague that triggered the Exodus was the slaughter of the firstborn by the Angel of Death [Exodus 11-12]. Christ is the firstborn son of God; the Angel of Death is the Holy Spirit (see wikipedia here). Gideon is being cast as the Angel of Death; this is a fundamental scene for him in his role as the Holy Ghost. The other obvious allusion is to the angel with a sword that presided over another Exodus, namely the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden [Genesis 3:24]. We're going to have to come back to this Exodus idea when we have a little more detail about the circumstances of the crucifixion. But in the meantime I think most people will allow that this additional Biblical material is in there, and that the parallels are not coincidental. The fact that the second episode is clearly described as a crucifixion does a lot to help us through these multiple layers of meaning. But the description of the first episode is a little more "elliptical," to use Craig's word (see the 2014 Providence Phoenix interview, here), and we need to focus on Sweet Payne itself for a first cut at the details. The east side is where we met with those guys That said they'd get us high but that changed Now they're down in the basement And they're bashing out his brains Kids are getting cut up with the motorcycle chains And St. Paul had it all when we called And they were maxing out on medicine A shaved head and the blood on the bed And those guys you recognize, they got the same tattoos as Gideon At a very general level, what appears to have happened is that the kids met with "those guys" on the "east side" of "St. Paul"; the next verse confirms that "those guys" are the Skins, with "the same tattoos as Gideon." The meeting was friendly at first; the Skins "said they'd get us high." But "that changed" later, and some bad stuff happened; in particular, they started "bashing out [Charlemagne's] brains" "down in the basement," cutting him (and at least one other of the kids) up with "motorcycle chains." So as opposed to a stabbing, this is a beating, but also a flogging with motorcycle chains. For comparison, we have this from Runner's High: I remember a dream about you. Getting hit on the head And left to bleed to death in the vestibule. And then it came true. and this, from Banging Camp: When they say killer whales They mean they whaled on him till they killed him up in penetration park So again this is a beating, focused on the head, with lots of bleeding, which is consistent with the motorcycle chain flogging. So far so good. The last few words of the BCamp reference seem to complicate things though: they *almost* killed him, not killed him, right? And isn't penetration park the scene of the crucifixion, that is, the second episode rather than the first? The aha that puts these things together is that this first episode too is a chapter in Charlemagne's Christ story. See, just a few verses before the crucifixion stabbing, John 19:1-3: Then Pilate therefore took Jesus, and scourged him. And the soldiers platted a crown of thorns, and put it on his head, and they put on him a purple robe, And said, Hail, King of the Jews! and they smote him with their hands. Here again, Charlemagne is in the role of Christ, sitting in Pilate's judgment hall. The motorcycle chains are the scourge. The head injuries are the crown of thorns. And the beating is when they smote him with their hands. In the 2005 MAGNET interview ( link), Craig tosses out a fantastic line that confirms this reading: Like Christ, Charlemagne is supported by money from women [Luke 8:3; see MINTS, CA, etc.]. He's "second-generation" like the Son. And he wears a "purple suit" like Christ in the hall of judgment [John 19:2]. Thank you for reading, and if you can please take a moment to remember Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 12, 2016 11:33:36 GMT -5
Massive Nights ends with the Narrator finally arrived in the heaven of the "unified scene" (we already noted parallels between heaven and the unified scene back in our discussion of Hostile, Massachusetts), as he and Mary are crowned the king and the queen of the prom [MN, SPositive]. But again, that last verse is strange: She had the gun in her mouth She was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that We'd been crowned The king and the queen Along with the earlier questions: why "at her dreams"? We don't have enough to answer that question now, either. But we remember that Sapphire has "dreams," too, dreams that are explicitly identified with her precognitive visions [YS]. That's a second vote (after "Hail Mary, full of grace" [BCrosses]) in favor of an identification of Sapphire with Mary. This is uncertain stuff; we're a long way from being able to make a call about the Sapphire question. But we want to be keeping track of arguments for and against. Of more immediate interest, there are elements of Catholic prayer that keep coming to the front in all of this. 1) There's the moment when the Narrator was down "on his knees" [MN], praying to her in the sexualized way typical of Hold Steady songs (e.g. the famous "she was awkward and thoughtful and ascending into heaven dripping wet" of Arms and Hearts). 2) From Both Crosses we've quoted a literal prayer to Mary, the Ave Maria ("Hail Mary, full of grace") [BCrosses]. 3) And in Massive Nights, in the moment they reach heaven, she's crowned the Queen. In this context the words remind us of Mary, Queen of Heaven, and the two important prayers addressed to her: the Ave Regina Caelorum (Hail, Queen of Heaven) and the Regina Caeli (Queen of Heaven). About these prayers (all of the following is taken from Wikipedia): The Ave Regina Caelorum ( link) "is said from the Feast of the Presentation [the 'Meeting of the Lord'] ... through Wednesday of Holy Week," and begins: Hail, O Queen of Heaven enthroned. Hail, by angels mistress owned. Root of Jesse, Gate of Morn Whence the world's true light was born The Regina Caeli or Regina Coeli ( link) "is sung or recited ... during the Easter season, from Holy Saturday through the Saturday after Pentecost," and begins: Queen of Heaven, rejoice, alleluia. The Son whom you merited to bear, alleluia. Has risen, as He said, alleluia. Pray for us to God, alleluia. The fact that the one opens with Queen of Heaven ... Jesse ... and the other with Queen of Heaven ... Halleluiah ... is pretty damn interesting, in the way that the occurrence of Hurricane Holly nine months before July 1977 & "the songs that everybody finally sings along" is pretty damn interesting. The fact is that none of the names in the story are arbitrary. All of them are meaningful. We saw that "Shepard" is an allusion to Tim Shepard of the Outsiders. In an identical but far more important way, "Mary" is an allusion to Mary, Queen of Heaven. She stands beside the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon as characters mapped to the figures of religion (Mary, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost respectively). We're not close to done talking about this subject, but this will do for a start. In the meantime we're feeling pretty good about the hypothesis that the girl from Party Pit is Mary. This idea has led us to a number of conclusions that square nicely with what we know so far, and has turned up a few more things that seem very unlikely to be a coincidence, even if their meaning is not yet clear. So we're going to keep running with it --- always looking for more confirmation, but with a good deal of confidence that we're on the right track. We still don't know what's up with Sapphire, but we haven't yet run into anything that requires a fourth character in order to be explained; we can keep working on this too. I know there was more innuendo than conclusion in the above, but I need to keep things a little shorter this week. While talking of prayers, if you have a moment, please remember Still Alive Carl. Thanks.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 11, 2016 13:15:05 GMT -5
Gearing up for a heavy week here, so I have to keep these a little shorter for now.
If the Narrator knows Mary from high school, that's interesting. His "It's great to see you're still in the bars" [BBlues] sounds a little ironic. There might be kind of a note of regret in "So we sailed off on some separate trips" [PP], some bitterness in "She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls" [PP].
Where did that come from? What happened?
Well, what else do we know about the Narrator's life in high school?
We know kind of a lot, actually. But the first stop we're looking for is Massive Nights: the story of the Narrator and Mary at prom together.
Everyone knows what kind of night it was. It was a massive night, it was perfect. Everything was right. They were all powered up. Everyone was cool. Mary and the Narrator drank, they kissed, they did more than kiss --- sometimes Craig swaps in the lyric "and we fucked in your church," but the sex is already in the album version: the Narrator was getting busy when he was down on his knees, going down on her, which is why the chaperone said it was time for him to leave [MN] ...
The night comes to a climax, and the Narrator learns that they've been crowned the king and the queen --- a moment of exaltation that he later identifies with the "unified scene" of his dreams [SPositive]:
When the chaperone crowned us the king and the queen I knew that we'd arrived at a unified scene And all those little lambs from my dreams Well, they were there too
It was heaven. But something's off ... the music falls away, and the last verse describes Mary in weird, ambiguous language [MN]:
She had the gun in her mouth She was shooting up at her dreams When the chaperone said that We'd been crowned The king and the queen
A gun in her mouth, and shooting? Shooting up? It sounds like suicide, it sounds like heavy drugs. What's going on?
Massive Nights alone doesn't give us enough to answer these questions. But we have an idea, now, why the Narrator is thinking about her later, in Party Pit. They've got a history together; she's an important person in his life. (Still hypothetically, of course. We need more confirmation to feel sure this is right.)
I hope this is getting more interesting and more convincing as we go. Thanks for reading, thank you for remembering Still Alive Carl.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 11, 2016 13:09:12 GMT -5
Wow, it looks like you're right, I'm surprised. I'd seen a number of guides for doing it with iPhones (at least with certain providers), and with Google Voice, and I just assumed it was a matter of loading the right file to the right place in the right format. But it seems that if the provider doesn't support file upload, there's not much you can do.
Like you say though, it shouldn't matter much --- sound quality might not be absolutely perfect, but people are going to get the message. Enjoy!
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jan 10, 2016 13:38:04 GMT -5
We talked about knowing where the boundaries of the universe are, and about having a pretty good idea that the Narrator, Charlemagne, and Gideon are the only male POV/main characters in the story. We obviously would like to work out the same thing with respect to the female characters, but this is complicated by the Sapphire problem. We started out by defining The Test as something that gets applied afterward. You can't deduce your way through the story. You have to try things out and see how far they get you. Every conclusion presented so far was just a hypothesis that (to my mind) has held up after a crapload of backtracking out of ones that didn't. Same for this next bit, only now I'm going to be a little more explicit about the try things out part. People have guessed that "Sapphire" was another name for Mary or Holly, and there are plenty of good reasons to do that (ignore for a minute the fact that Craig has said something somewhere about Sapphire not being Holly). Sapphire, we know, has precognitive visions [YS]; similarly: - Holly reports having had "visions" [CatCT]. - The description of the visions experienced by the girl in Both Crosses is followed by the exclamation "Hail Mary, full of grace" [BCrosses]. - In fact, Jesse too, as the POV character of Criminal Fingers, reports having had "visions" [CF]. So we have plenty of options for identifying Sapphire with already-known characters; quite rightly, no one wants to make this more complicated than it needs to be by hypothesizing yet another precog girl into the mix. Following this same line of thinking, I decided to see how far I could get with the idea that there are only three female POV/main characters: Holly, Mary, and Jesse. Add two more things we think we know to the mix: One: that the Narrator met Holly for the first time at a bar party [FN] where his band was playing [BBlues], when she'd just arrived in the Twin Cities after having traveled with Charlemagne from Lynn, MA [HM, CiS]. (We discussed this in detail already, I include the song references just to keep the basic evidence handy.) Two: that the Narrator met Jesse for the first time when she jumped him backstage after a show [SM]. Also, Jesse's a lot younger than Charlemagne ("I guess you're old enough to know" [CSongs], she identifies him with her father [CF, Magazines], etc.); if, as appears to be the case, the Narrator and Charlemagne are more or less the same age, we have pretty good reason to believe she's a lot younger than the Narrator, too. Now, Party Pit. I guess I met her at the party pit She said those kids she's with were selling it So we sailed off on some separate trips She got pinned down at the party pit I went away to school that fall She stuck around with all those stickpin dolls Sped through the scene until the engine stalled At some suburban shopping mall [chorus] I came back to start a band, of course ... The POV character here is the Narrator; he's the one who came back from school to start a band. He reports that he went away to school "that fall," that is, sometime in the year after meeting "her" at the party pit. So who's "she"? He met Holly in a bar after he came back from school. He met Jesse backstage much later than that (who was anyway a little girl when he was in high school). If we're running with the idea that there are just three main female characters to choose from, that means that the girl he met at the party pit, in his senior year in high school, has to be Mary. The girl at the bar party who says "It's good to see you back in a bar band, baby" [BBlues] would therefore also be Mary, who for the rest is identified as being present [Swish]. His response, "It's great to see you're still in the bars," is consistent with what we know of their past; he knows her from the drug scene, where she stuck around after he left [PP]. It's just a hypothesis, but so far it's looking all right. A quick note about what happens in Party Pit. There's been a lot of speculation in these boards, the Hold Steady wiki, etc. about "pinned" versus "pinned down" and the meaning of those words. The term is definitely "pinned," which means "high" in some way that isn't quite positive, as is shown by "she's pinned and way too shaky" [CT] and the annoying girl from BU who "asks if you want to come in and get pinned" [FB]. I think the confusion here comes from the fact that the movement of the music makes "pinned ! down at the party pit" sound like "pinned down ! at the party pit." Which is how it sounds, and which is definitely confusing. But there's an explanation for this, namely, that Craig wrote the lyrics first and then gave them to Franz to score, rather than fitting the lyrics to music that Tad already wrote. And Franz, like most of us not being familiar with the term "pinned," read it as "pinned down" instead. That's my inference from the 2006 Pitchfork interview ( link): Thank you for reading, and please think of Still Alive Carl for a moment if you can.
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