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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 16, 2021 5:59:44 GMT -5
...which make me really curious about the very last line for Rock For Lite Brite. Yes! what you're seeing is real ... that's coming up. :-)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 15, 2021 7:36:06 GMT -5
LASER SHOWEven amid the perspective shifts and out-of-order narration of the Final Party, we can still work out what happens. Let's take it from the beginning. ***The party kicks off after the kids and the gangsters go down to Swede Hollow, as described by Juanita in TFatBR (after the rewind from the first verse; see WE ALL WENT DOWN above): you see we all went down to meet that guy with the eyepatch [TFatBR] Things start in the usual way, with the "kids" [Manpark] doing gangsters and doing drugs; in the very next line, Juanita remarks on her "drippin wet" state (see VARIETIES OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT above): and i was nervous i was nauseous i was drippin wet with heat rash [TFatBR] In fact, we have two different descriptions of this same moment in the party, the first from Juanita's perspective in TFatBR, the second from Dwight's in Manpark. and i was nervous i was nauseous i was drippin wet with heat rash [TFatBR] angel's hurt and high in exaltation slip slidin on the lubrication [Manpark] The implication of Dwight's statement, coming after the first three verses of Manpark in which he celebrates the sex-for-drugs trade and his own agency in it, is that he's taken advantage of seeing Juanita again in order to fuck her. Finally, looking ahead a few lines, he was drippin wet with gin fizz he was half dead and dynamite [TFatBR] will confirm that the Narrator has been working the shrubbery at the same time as Juanita, blowing gangsters ("gin"; see LACED SUSBSTANCES above) and doing drugs ("dynamite"; see LISTED above). ***With the party now going in full gear, and having fortified himself with speed, the Narrator steps offstage to wherever he's stashed the supplies he brought (see INVITED above), and returns in costume: finally the guy with the eyepatch arrives [TFatBR] So Juanita is finally reunited with her Eyepatch Guy. They talk. The Eyepatch Guy starts by dissing "her boyfriend" [KatKH] Dwight, telling her a story about having loaned him money to set him up in business as a dealer. Most of this backgrounder is a lie (see EYEPATCH GUY above), but there's one detail that's true: dwight's got a jones [TFatBR] From our first meeting with Dwight at the very beginning of the story (by which point he's already established as a dealer, meaning that these events postdate the Eyepatch Guy's fictitious "loan"), he always appears nursing a crack pipe. It's with him - the first time he hits on Juanita, before Party Zero ("well i like you dwight but i don't like the pipe" [NN]; see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above);
- through the Return Parties ("he pulled out a pipe in the taxi" [ILtL]; see FRONTAGE ROAD above);
- at the Mission Party (the Narrator identifies him to the townie chick as "the boy with a pipe in his face" [KatKH]; see LOOKING FOR K above);
- at the Final Party itself ("i'm like a pied piper" [Manpark]; "the chainsmoker" [TFatBR]).
Relatedly, in Secret Santa Cruz, Juanita describes the Dwight who invited her to Party Zero as a "crackhead" (see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above): and the night of all that bloodshed i was kissin' on some crackhead who said he knew about a party [SSC] And coming back to the present, she calls him a "chainsmoker" [TFatBR]. These details confirm that Dwight's "jones" is a pre-existing condition, used by the Eyepatch Guy to add color to his story. (Clarity on this point helps reduce the scope of uncertainty about the remaining events of the Final Party.) ***Now the Eyepatch Guy issues his call to action, in two lines that wrap the heart of the mystery of the Final Party in an extended double meaning. We want to take on the second line first: i want the nice nice up in blazes [TFatBR] On the surface, this is straightforward: it's the point at which the Eyepatch Guy tells "fire lighter for hire" [CaAoC] Juanita to burn down the "club." The terms "nightclub fires" [SWH] and "arson" [SSC] have prepared us to imagine a literal act of arson --- a framing which is, for the rest, a real reflection of the Narrator's fantasy of violent revenge on the gangsters (see CHARLEMAGNE above). But in fact it's *not* an act of arson that's being described. Leaving aside the vengeful framing, the Narrator's overriding goal is the same one he's had for a month: namely, to grab Juanita by the hand and get her away from the gang. His attempt to do this at the Mission Party two weeks earlier failed because he wasn't "ready" [RfLB] for the gangsters' parking lot "security" [Bloomington] (see CARGO VAN above). But now he's wiser: he knows that they'll be keeping a close eye on things, and that he needs a way to distract that collective eye from his planned escape. ***So what, finally, does the Narrator do? From under his raincoat (he is in full Eyepatch Guy gear), he pulls out a bag that he's brought along, containing a supply (see INVITED above) of a certain kind of drugs, and hands it to Juanita. Then he stands up in the middle of the party and announces to the crowd that she's giving them out for free. [*1] Evidence for this is found in several places. In its description of the Narrator dropping out to join the gang and "waiting on the wednesday shipment" [RfLB] (see RASTAFARI GUY above), Rock For Lite Brite includes the following detail: and you're hooking up the laser show we can use a couple visuals [RfLB] "Lazers," we recall, is slang for psilocybin mushrooms (see LISTED above); the drugs the Narrator has brought are *hallucinogenic.* His plan, and his reason for bringing them along, is to fill the heads of the Final Party-goers with "visuals," so that he and Juanita can escape in the confusion. [*2] Further confirmation of this is found in La Quereria, which describes both the kids enjoying their "liberties" and the Narrator "saving" the party with his party favors (compare Gideon's "party saviors" in Milkcrate Mosh): the kids are living liberally loving all their liberties [LQ] ... he took the porches like a preacher takes the pulpit he says the nightlife is the only thing that could possibly save us [LQ] The liberties *are* the party favors; "liberties" is, again, documented slang for psilocybin mushrooms (see LISTED above). This image of the Eyepatch Guy seizing the metaphoric means of distribution ("the porches") and freely dispensing hallucinogens to the party is also reported in Sherman City: and hey jones beach don't you freak when you see me mc sweet lemme free your party [SCity] MC Sweet was the rapper who put out "Jesus Christ (The Gospel Beat)" in 1982 --- a Christian rap single about how Jesus "set us free" ( discogs; youtube). Here again, the Eyepatch Guy seizes control of the party "like a preacher takes the pulpit" [LQ], through free distribution of the "sweet" stuff (see LISTED above). Another angle on "liberties" and freeing the party is found in Touch My Stuff, which, in alluding to Bad Brains ("Right Brigade" is the 13th track on Bad Brains' self-titled first album), recalls the Narrator-as-Rastafari-Guy and "laser show" of RfLB (see RASTAFARI GUY above): and the right brigade, that's the funny thing it ain't just a money thing it's a question of community the liberty, the ecstasy, the love, the drugs, the unity [TMS] The Final Party is one of the Wednesday night parties, but it's not only "a money thing": the "liberty" of the Narrator's laser show is free. The Final Party is the "total party [when] you'll barely know me" [SH] promised by him to Juanita during the phone call of Summer House (the song). Of course this freedom isn't beneficent; "don't you freak when you see me" [SCity] reveals the Eyepatch Guy's intent to strike fear into his enemies (a fear which Dwight, for his part, feels, as documented in "hadn't seen the eyepatch guy since the LBI/ yeah 1999's comin up on a cool corvette" [Manpark] and "you know i think they might be onto me" [TFatBR]; see EYEPATCH GUY above). Recall, too, Craig's statement to Keith Harris that "Blackbeard would twist bits of flaming rope into his beard so his face would be smoking when he went into battle" ( link, and see EYEPATCH GUY above); Craig's point in saying so is to note that, when going into battle, *Blackbeard brought the visuals.* ***Juanita's involvement as the "fire lighter for hire" [CaAoC] serves a practical purpose. It's one thing for the Eyepatch Guy to announce that he's buying a round for the house; it's another thing for him to go around among the gangsters and Dwight, and physically try to foist a dose on each. He can't do that and expect to be trusted. But Juanita can. [*3] That her role as the Narrator's agent in the "laser show" [RfLB] consists in getting everybody high is confirmed by the previous line: get em going with your stereo equipment and you're hooking up the laser show [RfLB] His "stereo equipment" is Juanita, the "little sister with your stereo sound" [TGatSD] (see STEREO SOUND above). ***The connections between this scene and the THS Crucifixion are not only explicit, they provide a thoroughly grounded account of what was otherwise one of the hardest-to-accept conclusions of the Here Goes thread: namely, the non-violent but otherwise insane special-effects plot hatched by Gideon involving the Pepper's Ghost trick ( heregoes). Like the LP Narrator's plan, Gideon's is built on "visuals" and "laser shows": Strung out on residuals and visuals and laser shows [SPayne] And like the LP gangsters, the Skins are susceptible to his scheme because of their drug-addled state: Where townies would gather and drink until blackout Smoke cigs 'till they're sick, pack bowls and then pass out [OftC] This last line is attention-grabbing; what it describes is precisely the meaning of the verb "blaze" ( gdict; urbandictionary), down to the very terms used in the urbandictionary definition: The act of packing a bowl of marijuana and setting fire to it with the intent of inhaling the resulting smoke The ONDCP document too corroborates this with its definition of "blazing" ( ondcp): Blazing − Smoking marijuana In short, when the Eyepatch Guy says he wants "the Nice Nice up in blazes" [TFatBR], what he means is that he's going to get everybody high out of their minds and hallucinating. The insanity of THS "laser show" turns out to be just a creative elaboration of the LP original. [*1] The description of the Eyepatch Guy "with a big straw hat" is a reference to the drug dealer in the Velvet Underground's song I'm Waiting For The Man; he's got "a big straw hat," and "you always gotta wait" for him to arrive; but it's OK, because "he's got the works, he gives you sweet taste" ( link). [*2] These "laser show" hallucinations are also what's referred to by "lite brite" [RfLB] in the song title; Lite Brite was a toy that could be used for creating visuals in a literal sense, "making things with light" ( wikipedia). [*3] Recall that the alpha girl "like(s) lightin fires" [CaAoC] specifically in the sense of "lov[ing] the way these little flames/ make everything all black and grey" [Epaulets], and thinking that "the blue looks beautiful toppin' off the torch" [SSC]; the fires she lights are the flames of lighting up, and the role itself is one for which she needs no coaching.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 14, 2021 6:09:00 GMT -5
DEPENDS ON WHO'S ASKINThe Final Party is very thinly documented relative to its importance in the story. It's useful to take a look at how that documentation is meted out before diving into the details of what actually happens. Fragments aside, all of our narrative information about the party comes from two sources: Manpark, and The Flex And The Buff Result (see WE ALL WENT DOWN above). About these two songs, consider: ***1) perspectiveIt's significant that Manpark and TFatBR are two out of only four songs in the entire LP catalog that are told from a perspective other than the Narrator's: Manpark from Night Club Dwight's, and TFatBR from Juanita's (the other two are Bloomington from Juanita's perspective, and SH1999 from Dwight's. We know now that CaAoC and Mono, apparently in the voice of the Eyepatch Guy, are in the voice of the Narrator after all; see EYEPATCH GUY above). In other words, *both of our narratives about the party come from someone who doesn't see the whole picture, and who in fact is under a false impression both about the person of the Eyepatch Guy and about what's objectively happening.* ***2) drug-addledBoth songs confirm that both Juanita ("i was nervous i was nauseous i was drippin wet with heat rash" [TFatBR], "angel's hurt and high in exaltation" [Manpark]) and Dwight ("now dwight's never home now that dwight's got a jones" [TFatBR], "did my little bit in the bathroom" [Manpark]) are fucked up on drugs, adding to the confusion of the stories they tell. ***3) out-of-orderThe events of both songs are told out of order. Manpark starts out in the park, then describes Dwight's waking up on 15th and Franklin, then rewinds back to the park to describe the beginning of the "manhunts" [Manpark]; TFatBR rewinds from a later scene back to the beginning of the party ("you see we all went down to meet that guy with the eyepatch" [TFatBR]). ***4) late in catalogBoth songs appear on the last Lifter Puller album. In Steve's Back To The City podcast interview with Simon Calder --- which everyone should listen to --- Steve gives a long answer to a question about TFatBR (for about two minutes starting at 30:30: link) in which he includes the following note: Steve hedges his guess here, and in fact we've seen Craig say something partly contradictory (with respect to the band's future) in the May 2000 "All the Right Moves" interview with Mike Daily (see STORY: WORKING THEORY above, and link): But hedges aside, both remarks are in agreement about the main point, that, from F&F on, Craig is engaged in a deliberate effort to progress the story, and arguably (in Steve's words) to "come full circle" with it. This accounts for the first appearance of actual narrative treatments of the Final Party in the form of Manpark and TFatBR on F&F; it also accounts for the fact that the remaining fragments pertaining to this last episode (found in Rental, SWH, TPatP, MTape, SCity, RfLB, LiaL, CRoom, NN, TMS, LDoL, SSC, LQ, and 4Dix) skew heavily toward F&F and the final "comps and seven-inches." ***In looking at this it's impossible not to notice the strongly *avoidant* character of Craig's approach to the climax of his story. It's an essential part of the work he's created, a work which he evidently wants to finish presenting in its entirety; but he puts off a real handling of that climax until late, and then, when he does finally start to dig into it, his recourse to indirections in order to avoid spelling out what happens goes through the roof. The very last of the Final Party fragments makes an observation about Dwight's "woke up up on 15th and franklin" [Manpark] that bears directly on this point: what happened on 15th and franklin depends on who's asking [4Dix] We've already quoted Craig on his use of the "unreliable narrator" technique in THS storytelling (see LIST OF CHARACTERS above); in fact, *this is where his use of that technique begins,* with Manpark, TFatBR, and the mystery of the Final Party. Whether he's deliberately trying to heighten the mystery, or leaving room for more storytelling, or both, it's evident that he doubles down on this approach in THS, which not only makes heavy use of unreliable narration from the beginning, but plumbs new depths of evasiveness when it comes to the analogous but much more complicated events of the THS Crucifixion (see heregoes and following posts).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 13, 2021 6:46:00 GMT -5
WE ALL WENT DOWNAt last the Two Weeks come to an end, and the kids stand on the threshold of the next Wednesday night party. Like other episodes of the story that need a simple handle, we'll refer to this one as the Final Party. The Final Party takes place in Swede Hollow, but this is by no means self-evident; we'll look carefully at the evidence *for* and *against* locating it there in separate sections below. ***FOR #1: Back to The CityThe Narrator, both in his own right and as the Eyepatch Guy, has been campaigning to get Juanita to bring the party back to The City in East St. Paul (see BACK TO THE CITY above). Her evident anticipation as she gets dressed up to see the Eyepatch Guy (see INVITED above) is a first indication that she's been successful in making this happen, and that that is in fact where the Final Party will take place. The gang won't be returning to the brewery bar per se, both because the Wednesday night parties need space on the scale of a warehouse, and because they know from their experience of The LBI that the bar is under guard now. The adjacent Swede Hollow park, on the other hand, is an ideal location for their purposes. ***FOR #2: THS Crucifixion partyIt's clear that the Final Party is reflected in the THS world by the party of Charlemagne's crucifixion; to start with the obvious parallels, - both are the last parties of their respective stories;
- both are the long-awaited culmination of the kids' two weeks with their respective gangs (see TWO WEEKS above).
The fact that the THS Crucifixion party takes place in Swede Hollow park (see heregoes for beginning of extended discussion) is, then, a second indication that the Final Party takes place in the same park. The discovery that the THS Crucifixion party is based on one of the LP Wednesday night speed distribution parties explains a formerly obscure point. In describing the Crucifixion party, One For The Cutters says: Windows wide open to let the hard rock in [OftC] This refers to the distribution of drugs into the park from the windows of vehicles parked somewhere adjacent to it. [*1] If the party had been for the gangsters' own entertainment, they could have carried a recreational supply on their own persons; the fact that it's an organized event for business purposes means that they need to keep their supply behind a "counter" of some kind. The fact that the Crucifixion party is organized by the gang for commercial purposes is, for the rest, the reason why the THS Narrator accounts for his presence there by saying I went there on business [SiM] ***FOR #3: Direct evidenceThe LP lyrics contain little *direct* evidence for the location of the Final Party, but what evidence there is also points to the park in Swede Hollow. Most of this comes from Manpark, which describes events of the Final Party from Night Club Dwight's perspective. a) First, there's evidence of the title, repeated in the description of the locale at the end: the manhunts always start down in the manpark [Manpark] which explicitly references a park; the implication in the name, that the park is a hotbed of homosexual activity, makes it a match for Charlemagne's "Penetration Park" [YHLF], which in Here Goes we showed to be a reference to Swede Hollow ( heregoes; heregoes). b) This identification is reinforced by the direction "down"; as we've already observed (see OSSEO above), *every* lyrical reference to going "down" to find trouble is a reference to the East St. Paul brewery area. Juanita's return to the brewery bar for The LBI is also located "down" with respect to Brooklyn Park in The West (see THE WEST above): and she lives in the brooklyn heights, she came down on a friday nights [TLaDiLBI] c) Furthermore, the action which is described as "start[ing] down in the manpark" ends up moving "up" from there: woke up up on 15th and franklin [Manpark] which again (see NIGHTCLUBS above) situates the Manpark down in St. Paul. d) Also, the party is explicitly located on the outskirts of the downtown [Manpark] which is a clear fit for Swede Hollow, immediately across the tracks from the Downtowner Car Wash (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above) on the outskirts of downtown St. Paul. e) Finally, these guys they gather in the public garden they're duckin into shrubs, crawlin out all smilin [Manpark] specifies a park with sufficiently thick greenery to permit discretion in the addicts' bj-drug exchanges, something that's important at a Wednesday night party when there are new/prospective customers around ("they only get invited cause they think that they might buy" [ASD]; the shrubs are the equivalent of "the room that's all the way at the back" at the Mission Party). Not all parks have this kind of shrubbery, but Swede Hollow does. ***In making the above points we want to take a look at two other candidates for the location of the Final Party: the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park. AGAINST #1: Minneapolis Sculpture GardenAn alternative candidate for the location of the Final Party is the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. Arguments in favor of locating the party there include: a) the reference to the "manpark" as "the public garden": these guys they gather in the public garden they're duckin into shrubs, crawlin out all smilin [Manpark] b) the fact that the Garden is located "on the outskirts of the downtown" [Manpark], but of Minneapolis, rather than St. Paul. c) the If Not For Hipster Pictures (Brokerdealer) reference to a drug party with "statues in the park": it was drugs that made your party seem like a party that was created in claymation it was drugs that didn't seem to have a purpose except for maybe recreation it was the statues in the park screamin in the dark tauntin all the teens sayin we need some desecration it's how you and me and me and you and you and me and me and you and you and me and me and you and all our friends are under observation they got the cameras with infrared vision they got the radiation to remedy the gunshots they got cops and they got soldiers stationed around the nation [INFHP] ***AGAINST #2: Loring ParkYet another candidate is Loring Park. Arguments in favor of locating the party there include: a) the fact that it's located "on the outskirts of the downtown" [Manpark] Minneapolis (as opposed to downtown St. Paul). b) the fact that Craig himself famously answered a question about Penetration Park in Matthew Fritch's 2005 Magnet interview by saying ( link): Though pointedly vague ("I was thinking of"), this early tidbit has become a commonplace of THS interpretation, and even Craig is now able to rattle it off without the open hedging ( link). If this is really meant to say that the Penetration Park events of the THS story are set in Loring Park, then the correspondence of Manpark to Penetration Park would argue for putting the Final Party in Loring Park as well. ***But there are multiple problems with both the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park as candidate locations: a) Neither park has shrubbery capable of concealing a sex act amid a public gathering. b) Both parks are located up above 15th and Franklin, rather than down below it. c) The Brokerdealer description of "your party [with] cameras with infrared vision" [INFHP] is a very strong match for The LBI (see COSTUME PARTY and FIRST BUST above); it is much easier to take "statues in the park" as a metaphoric reference to the kids fleeing The LBI through the park (see TWO AT A TIME above), than it is to try to reorient all the other details around a proposed literal reference to the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. d) The fact that we have *two* alternative locations to choose between must mean that one of them is in any case not literal (which makes this analogous to the Hardware costume problem: the ambiguity between explicitly described "dorothy" and "viking" costumes could only be resolved by an arbitrary choice if we didn't bring the evidence of the entire lyrical universe, including the "indian fringes," to bear on the question; see COSTUME PARTY above). e) The THS Crucifixion party with the woods and the water tower ( heregoes and following) clearly takes place in Swede Hollow; it also clearly takes place in the "Penetration Park" where Charlemagne is "punctured" [YLHF]. If "Penetration Park" is taken to be a literal reference to Loring Park, this opens up a cascade of violations of constraints that cannot easily be resolved. It is, in short, much simpler to account for these apparent alternatives to Swede Hollow by appealing to documented habits of speech on Craig's part, specifically via the understanding - that "public garden" and "Penetration Park" are real-world handles for the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park that Craig has appropriated for the Swede Hollow of his stories, just as he's appropriated "City Center" for The City in the same location (see THE CITY above);
- that the 2005 Loring Park comment is a case of Craig being evasive in interviews, like his dismissal of the last lines of Sherman City with "I think it just rhymed" (see CHARLEMAGNE above; for additional discussion see link).[*2]
***A final scrap of evidence in favor of Swede Hollow comes from The Flex And The Buff Result, in which Juanita (the song is told from her perspective; see EYEPATCH GUY above) says of the runup to the party: you see we all went down to meet that guy with the eyepatch [TFatBR] Here again "down" means down to the East Side of St. Paul. The THS reflection of this trip (the Skins' journey to the Crucifixion party) is described in Look Alive, and described in very similar terms: Crosstown, everybody was pooling their money Rolling on down to the railroad yard ... These bodies on this bus, it looks like they don't feel so good about themselves [LA] The implication is that the main body of the gangsters (not all of them have cars), including the Narrator and Juanita, travel to the party on the crosstown bus (compare "crosstown bus" [SPayne]) from the US-169 corridor in the west to the East Side of St. Paul where the railroad yard is located (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above). [*3]As for the TFatBR line specifically: it's not that all of them are going down for the purpose of meeting the Eyepatch Guy, but simply that all of them are going down to the party where, unbeknownst to them, he will make his appearance. It's Juanita for whom the prospect of meeting the Eyepatch Guy is front of mind; for her, he really is the object of their journey. [*4] [*1] In the Here Goes discussion, influenced by the identification of the Ambassador with the brewery bar in St. Paul, we'd come to the conclusion that the drug-distribution windows belonged to one of the brewery outbuildings at the northern end of the park ( heregoes); along with much of the other detail in the linked post, that conclusion has been overtaken by developments in this thread. [*2] The 2005 Magnet interview is packed with deliberate directions and indirections, such as the artful reference to Jesus in Craig's description of Charlemagne as "someone who would wear a purple suit, a second-generation drug dealer" ( heregoes), or his sly connection of Stevie Nix with urban myth operating "magically or mystically" ( heregoes). [*3] This bus ride down to the park for the Crucifixion loops in yet another Minneapolis park (along with the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park) whose name is appropriated for metaphoric purposes; for "up in Penetration Park" [YLHF, BCamp] Beer On The Bedstand substitutes "up in Painter's Park": This girl comin down to the south side. He's going to meet her up in Painter's Park. She usually keeps her distance He's too rough when he's all the way up. But no one's holding anything And she saw him on the bus [BotBedstand] Painter Park is located at 620 W 34th St. in Minneapolis, off of Lyndale; the point of the allusion is to characterize the park as the haunt of drug dealers, via "paint"=meth (see LISTED above). Beyond the bus ride, the rest of the details are all familiar: - "This girl comin down" and "he's going to meet her": compare "we all went down to meet that guy with the eyepatch" [TFatBR]
- "She usually keeps her distance": Juanita, who's been through with the Narrator since he tried to drown her (see UNDER WATER and MAILBOX above).
- "He's too rough when he's all the way up": the Narrator trying to drown Juanita (see UNDER WATER above).
[*4] In this sense, "we all" can be read as referring to just Juanita and the Narrator; compare "we all" in reference to exactly two people in MV and TLaDiLBI, and "these rats" in reference to just the two of them in "never asked to be king of these rats" [Langelos] (see JUST STARTED TALKING above).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 12, 2021 6:34:22 GMT -5
TWO WEEKS: SUMMARYHere's a summary of the events of the Two Weeks. ***- Though he's scared, the Narrator heads back to the next Wednesday night party determined to find and extract Juanita [LOOKING FOR K].
- He drives his Jeep to the old warehouse where the party is being held, and parks in the lot outside [CARGO VAN].
- Entering the warehouse, he doesn't see Juanita. Trying to avoid being noticed by the gangsters, he approaches one of their girls instead [LOOKING FOR K].
- He asks the girl if she knows where he can find K, referring to Juanita by her drug-fiend Katrina nickname [LOOKING FOR K].
- The girl misunderstands, thinking he means Ketamine, and tells him "this isn't a rave, it's a party" [LOOKING FOR K].
- The Narrator apologizes for the confusion, and blesses himself; he's terrified of this "party" [LOOKING FOR K].
- Thinking that he wants Ketamine, the girl directs him to the gangsters with the Copenhagen hats, saying that they're a good place to start [LOOKING FOR K].
- The Narrator clarifies that he's talking about K, Night Club Dwight's girlfriend [LOOKING FOR K].
- Finally understanding, the girl points him to the room in the back where Juanita's been giving blowjobs and getting high [LOOKING FOR K].
- The Narrator finds Juanita in a K-hole, wrecked and weird-talking. In her dissociated state, she follows him out, unresisting [CARGO VAN].
- Their escape does not go unnoticed; the Narrator's unpreparedness is exposed when the gangsters meet him with their dogs out in the parking lot [CARGO VAN].
- The gangsters restrain the Narrator, and lead the kids to a cargo van behind the warehouse [CARGO VAN].
*** - They arrive before sunrise. The kids are marched into the office of Shepard, the gang's leader, who's also just returned from the party [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- Shepard is very much in charge. He tells the Narrator to give an account of himself [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- Carefully, the Narrator explains that [SHEPARD'S MANSION]
- Juanita is his girlfriend;
- when she offered to blow the Kid from California for a hit, it wasn't with any plan of moving to the Summer House permanently;
- he'd like Shepard to let her go.
[/ul] - Shepard replies that the door is open for Juanita to stay or leave as she pleases. As a demonstration, he proposes a test [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- He tells Juanita that she can either leave with the Narrator, or else suck his dick and get a hit of meth [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- Juanita drops to her knees, sucks Shepard off, gets her reward, and withdraws into her high [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- You see, Shepard says: she wants to be here. This is where she can connect [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
***- Now, Shepard says, the door's open for you too [SHEPARD'S MANSION]:
- if you want to join up, I'll put you to work as a runner;
- but you don't have to join, and it's probably better for you to leave.
[/ul] - The Narrator looks at Juanita; there's no way he can leave. He agrees to join the gang [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
***- The Narrator is officially jumped in; they haze him, rape him, shave his head, burn the hair, and give him a Panama Jack painter's cap to wear [CARGO VAN, SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- Shepard reveals his impatience with the business, but explains to the Narrator how to do his job: first set the price, then agree on the amount [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
- Before sending everyone back out to work, Shepard shares with them his wisdom: The Future Is Now [SHEPARD'S MANSION].
***- Juanita resumes her role waiting on visiting cars from the porch of the Summer House, and servicing the gang [ROUGH RIDERS, INSTRUCTIONS].
- The Narrator is made to run with the "rough riders" through a sleepless two-week crime spree of sex, drugs, injuries, robberies, and dealing [ROUGH RIDERS].
- He's abandoned his job and the world completely; the two-week horizon is only visible in the prospect of the next Wednesday night party [RASTAFARI GUY, TWO WEEKS].
- He makes a point of trying to seem "hard," both to fit in and to protect himself against exploitation [ROUGH RIDERS].
- He returns to the Summer House often enough to observe how it works and be abused by other gangsters, but is always sent out again [ROUGH RIDERS, INSTRUCTIONS].
- One of the gangsters at the Summer House fakes a broken arm and uses the Narrator's name to get a prescription of pain pills [ROUGH RIDERS].
***- During one of the Narrator's visits to the Summer House, Juanita gets in a fight with the Kid From California (or one of his friends) in her room [NOSEBLEED].
- The guy hits her hard in the face, resulting in a deviated septum; she bleeds profusely from the nose, all over the bed [NOSEBLEED].
- The Narrator bangs on the door, which is locked, but she doesn't answer [NOSEBLEED].
- Others in the house arrive and kick in the door to find the room a bloody mess. The guy tells them it was a nosebleed [NOSEBLEED].
- Someone calls an ambulance; they clean Juanita up a bit and accompany her to the hospital [NOSEBLEED].
***- While out on the ranges, the Narrator calls Juanita's answering machine and leaves messages in the person of the Eyepatch Guy [INSTRUCTIONS].
- Knowing her influence over the staging of the gang's parties, he sees a chance to coordinate a return to St. Paul for the upcoming Wednesday night [BACK TO THE CITY].
- He leaves instructions for her to arrange to have the party held back in The City, promising (as the Eyepatch Guy) to meet her there if she succeeds [INSTRUCTIONS, BACK TO THE CITY, INVITED].
- In anticipation of the party, the Narrator stocks up on some supplies [INVITED].
***- When the Wednesday of the next party arrives, the Narrator and the "rough riders" meet up with the rest of the gang at the Summer House [CANDY'S ROOM].
- The Narrator goes downstairs to find Juanita in her basement bedroom, getting ready for the party [INVITED, CANDY'S ROOM].
- It's a bleak room, with very little furniture [CANDY'S ROOM]:
- its main furnishing is a mattress on the floor with cumstained navy sheets.
- it has a basement window with a lighter-burned sill, and bedsheets for curtains.
- it has a bed stand with a clock radio on it.
- outside it are hallways and a kitchenette with a microwave, a coffee can ashtray, and wine and beer.
[/ul] - Juanita tries to put together a sexy outfit for the party, telling the Narrator that she's going to meet the Eyepatch Guy there [INVITED].
- The Narrator doesn't get a say in her choice of clothing, but ends up braiding her hair in the same style she wore with her "indian" costume at The LBI [CANDY'S ROOM].
- The Narrator tells her that he's glad she invited the Eyepatch Guy, that he's looking forward to seeing what he's up against [INVITED].
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 9, 2021 8:22:06 GMT -5
CANDY'S ROOMLet's take a second look at those lines from Sangre De Stephanie in which we find Juanita dressing up sexy for the party: she's gettin stoned when i came down the stairs tryin to decide what the fuck she could wear and i helped her to take off that hair shirt slide right into that slit skirt and i'm glad you invited him like to know what i'm up against [SdS] This is the same wardrobe-assistance episode described in the opening verse of Sherman City (see THE GIRLS above), a verse which we've already identified as an account of the Two Weeks ("now we live in domes" [SCity]; see IN THE PARKING LOT above): [*1] she lets me braid her hair but she never lets me pick out what she wears [SCity] The same moment is also described by reflection in Navy Sheets, where the party she's getting dressed up for is the Crucifixion, THS analogue to the final party of LP: All dolled up for the funeral feast [NS] ***Looking past Juanita's dress-up dilemma, another especially interesting feature of the SdS passage is the reference to the stairs. The only place where Juanita can conceivably be getting dressed (let alone stoned while getting dressed) in preparation for the party is in the Summer House itself. The fact that the Narrator meets up with her there squares with the presumption that the gangsters gather in one place before traveling down to the festivities together (see WE ALL WENT DOWN below). We understand, then, that these lines describe the action on Wednesday afternoon, ahead of the party, in the moments after the Narrator's "rough riders" have returned to the Summer House to join up with the rest of the gang. When they arrive, the Narrator's first order of business is to go and see Juanita. Where exactly does he go to find her? He goes downstairs. This explains why Juanita's bedroom with the "thirty threesomes" [SCity] (which we've already identified as a reference to her bedroom in the Summer House; see ESTHER above) is described as "soundproof" [SCity]; it's in the basement. ***The evidence of Family Farm further confirms this inference. We've seen that the heavily guarded "family farm" is the Summer House (see LOOKING FOR K and SHEPARD'S MANSION above). The song describes how the alpha girl "brought" the Narrator there after the Mission Party; two verses earlier, it describes how she herself first arrived there after The LBI: She came into the cantina singing This Must Be The Place [FFarm] The literal meaning of "cantina" is 'basement' (specifically, the basement as a storage place for liquor; wiktionary). This is "Candy's Room": like in the Springsteen original, it's the room of a girl who entertains "strangers from the city" ( link), and the room where the Narrator of the song wants to be. ***Note that the real-life Summer House candidate we identified on Jefferson Hwy in Osseo (see OSSEO above) does have a basement; see the window well at ground level ( link): ***Back In Blackbeard introduces us to a strange but important reflection on this topic. Namely, it confirms that the basement is the origin point of Juanita's world, but also indicates that there's more than one of them: don't blame your daughter's downfall on her dancin don't blame your baby's binging on the bass bins blame the boredom, blame the basements [BiB] The "basements" alluded to here aren't basement shows (it's not the "bass bins," i.e. the music, that's to blame for her "downfall"). [*2] Rather, they're specific places to which Juanita goes in her hunt for drugs (like her boredom, they're a symptom of her addiction; see BORED above): 1) The first basement is the Hamm's brewery bar, originally the Rathskeller, literally "council cellar" in German ( wiktionary; see NICE NICE and ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above). 2) The second is her basement bedroom in the Summer House. Having identified these two rooms as the twin centers of the Lifter Puller underworld, Craig does a very strange thing with them: [*3] in the same way that he unites all the caves and domes and clubs where the Scene gets together as manifestations of the singular Nice Nice (see NICE NICE above), here he goes to extreme lengths to paint the physical environments of the two "basements" as symmetric mirrors of each other. | Brewery Bar | Candy's Room | Both have a "bed" | the carpet (see ON THE FLOOR: CARPET & HARDWOOD above); "Blood on the carpet" [OwtB]; "Waking up on the carpet" [DH] | a dirty mattress on the floor [Spectres]; "your mattress" [SGS]; "Mud on the mattress" [OwtB]; "Rolling off of the mattress" [DH] | Both have a "stand" | the milkcrate | the bed stand | Both have a music box on the stand | the boombox (see THE TUNES and ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above) | a clock radio (see ON THE FLOOR: MUSIC and ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above) | Both have window coverings | shutters, "bars on the windows" [CSTLN], "venetian blinds" [SdS] (see BREWERY BAR: THE CORNER above) | "Hotel room in Houston with the shades against the sunshine" [EC], "bedsheets for curtains" [No Future] | Both have a window where she spends time | "All the burns on the windowsill/ Says she's crazy about horses still" [UB] | "She appeared as a wraith in the drapes ... Some nights St. Paul seems so holy ... Saw the sun through a crack in the curtains" [R&T] | Both have, or are near, a "kitchen"/"bar" | the "kitchen" and the actual bar (see THE KITCHEN above) | the "kitchenette" with wineglass/black and tans [C&N, HCovenant] | Both rooms are otherwise empty | "snuck into the ballroom and made echoes in its empty" [UB] (see ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above) | "her room is kind of bleak" [Esther] | Both have hallways outside | the hallways of the stockhouse; "hundred miles of hallways" [UB] | "all the halls" [Ambassador] | Both are characterized as her apartment | "luxury apartment on the top floor of some high-rise building" [TPProcedure], "your apartment" [Sublet], "southside hardwood floor apartment" [SGS] | "she had her own apartment" [HCamera], "southside hardwood floor apartment" [SGS] | Both are linked to "porches" | metaphoric reference to swinging: "you fell off of the porch swing" [NC], "swinging from the porches" [Hardware] | the actual porch of the Summer House; "you can buy it off the porch" [SSC], etc. | Both have a door behind which she's shut | "open up the bathroom door" [Emperor] (see A MESSAGE above) | "banging on the door again" [Lanyards] (see NOSEBLEED above) | Both are described as bloodied | "we woke up on bloody carpets" [PJ], "Blood on the carpet" [OwtB] | "bloody mattresses" [Spectres], "too much blood for a nose bleed" [Lanyards] (see NOSEBLEED above) | Both are described as loud with the sound of Juanita's shouting | "man it's gettin loud out/ i'm shaking in the downtown" [SBackwards] (see STEREO SOUND above) | "it gets so loud it's like thirty threesomes" [SCity] | Both are characterized as a storage space | stockhouse #4 (see AIRPORT & LBI above) | "sleeping in a storage space by the airport" [TOT]; "cantina" [FFarm] | Both are characterized as being in a house | "party house" [TLTtSTtM, BSam] | "summer house" [SH], "house arrest" [LQ] | Both are characterized as being in a fortress | "earpiece dudes in a fortified fortress" [TS&tT] | "She brought me to a fortress she called the family farm" [FFarm] |
This insistent superimposition accounts for the fact that the two locations are regularly described in ambiguous terms, as if one is the other: - the "southside hardwood floor apartment" [SGS] is described both as the place Juanita brings her stolen drugs back to (the brewery bar), and the place with a mattress where she's sad at the end of the summer (the Summer House).
- Denver Haircut describes a room that is otherwise unambiguously the brewery bar as having a clock and a mattress; You Did Good Kid similarly puts a spray-painted mattress in what is otherwise evidently a description of the bar.
- the Ambassador, where Mary ends up living in the THS story, is identified with the brewery bar, rather than with the "west coast" equivalent to the Summer House where Holly went (see NICE NICE above).
- Mary smokes and looks out from her room over the view of St. Paul [R&T].
- the "detective" in Blankets, like the detective in 11AF, finds the Narrator's girlfriend, but he finds her "in the skyway in St. Paul" [Blankets], rather than in a house in the western suburbs.
- the brewery bar (and, separately, the Ambassador) is described as having a bloody "bed" [SPayne] in it, when this is a furnishing of Juanita's room in the Summer House (see NOSEBLEED above).
and so on. Of course this ambiguous treatment of two objects under a single aspect, or one object under a dual aspect, isn't new in Craig's work. But it's especially pronounced in the case of the "basements." ***The dirty mattress on the floor in the Summer House basement deserves a few more comments: 1) Among the reasons adduced by hysterical Juanita for leaving with the gangsters at the end of The LBI (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above) was the following: i'm sick of being scared of falling off the side of my bed [TLaDiLBI] This is how we know that her bed is a mattress on the floor; moving into the Summer House means that she doesn't have to be scared of falling off the edge any more. 2) The reflection of the LP Narrator's visit to Juanita's room on the THS version of the kids' time among the gangsters illuminates the otherwise obscure line Everybody's coming onto navy sheets [NS] "Everybody," here, is involved in analogy to Juanita's "thirty threesomes" [SCity]; the bed in Juanita's bedroom has navy sheets, and the visiting Narrator is treated to an after-the-fact view of how "the sheets stain" [NS]. 3) The "bedsheets for curtains" mentioned in No Future as the ultimate legacy of the meeting with Dwight at the Riverside Perkins seem likely to have been taken from the navy pile, too. We can believe it when we're told that "her room is kind of bleak" [Esther]. [*1] Seeing that the sexy "indian" costume was a hit with the Eyepatch Guy the first time around, it is likely that Juanita is trying to recreate the effect of the "indian" costume from The LBI, and that the reference to braids is therefore literal. [*2] The "basements" [BiB] aren't basement shows, but it's very much to the point that basement shows are held in basements because they're soundproof (compare "she's proud of her soundproof bedroom" [SCity]). [*3] The idea of framing the story in the symmetry of basement at the beginning to basement at the end is unusual, but we have strong evidence that this is *exactly* how Craig is inclined to order things. A notable example from Craig's fiction is the arc of Charlemagne's presence in the THS story, from his first appearance on stage under the "spotlights" in the opening line of CiS, to his final (physical) appearance under the "hot soft light" of the projector at the end of HSL and SShoes. An even more revealing example from real life is documented in Ryan Leas' recent (2021) Stereogum interview "We've Got A File On You." In the interview, Craig describes opening for The Replacements at New York's Forest Hills Stadium --- a tennis stadium --- and says ( link, link):
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 8, 2021 5:27:59 GMT -5
INVITEDThe Narrator's having a rough time of it, but the two weeks between parties are coming to an end on schedule, and he's ready to make his move. In summary, he's done three things to prepare: 1) He's instructed Juanita to arrange to have the next Wednesday night party held down in The City (see INSTRUCTIONS and BACK TO THE CITY above). 2) He's gathered some supplies that he'll need in order to carry out his plan (we'll see the evidence for this when we come to the final party itself; see LASER SHOW below). 3) He's made a date with Juanita to see her at the party (in the person of the Eyepatch Guy). ***Let's review the evidence for the third point, about the date. We know that the Eyepatch Guy shows up at the final party, because The Flex And The Buff Result, which is the story of that party, tells us as much: you see we all went down to meet that guy with the eyepatch [TFatBR] A subtler detail from the lead-in to this same event comes to us from Sangre De Stephanie, which describes Juanita getting ready for the party and dressing up sexy in her excitement to see someone: she's gettin stoned when i came down the stairs tryin to decide what the fuck she could wear and i helped her to take off that hair shirt slide right into that slit skirt and i'm glad you invited him like to know what i'm up against [SdS] It's clearly the Narrator speaking in these lines, and clearly Juanita about/to whom he's speaking. That leaves the question, who's the "him" who she's "invited"? Whoever it is, he is, like Night Club Dwight, a rival for Juanita's affections. But it can't be Dwight; "like to know what i'm up against" indicates that, as far as Juanita knows, this person and the Narrator have never met before, whereas the Narrator and Dwight have known each other ever since Juanita introduced them at the Riverside Perkins ahead of Party Zero (see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above). The only other person to whom this can possibly refer is the remaining object of Juanita's affection, namely, the Eyepatch Guy. The Narrator's defiance of his rival, stated for Juanita's benefit, is tongue-in-cheek. ***Juanita's anticipation of finally seeing the Eyepatch Guy after their long "correspondence" [BSam] appears to be another justification (along with the drug references in "the Waves" and "Walking On Sunshine"; see KATRINA above) for picking up the name "Katrina" from the name of the band Katrina And The Waves. The band's hit Walking On Sunshine begins ( link): I used to think maybe you loved me, now, baby, I'm sure And I just can't wait till the day when you knock on my door Now every time I go for the mailbox, gotta hold myself down Cause I just can't wait till you write me you're coming around This is precisely the situation in which Juanita finds herself during the Two Weeks, right down to the "mailbox" [Bloomington] (see MAILBOX above) as her medium of communication with the Eyepatch Guy. ***Note, finally, that Juanita's authority to invite the Eyepatch Guy is taken for granted; this doesn't in itself prove that that authority is special, but it's consistent with the other evidence we've seen of her ability, as "queen of the clubs" [HDaD], to dictate the staging of the gang's parties (see BACK TO THE CITY above).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 7, 2021 8:29:16 GMT -5
IN THE PARKING LOTAs noted early on (see LIST OF CHARACTERS above), Sherman City is both the most obscure of all the Lifter Puller songs, and also one of the more important sources of information about the story. For thoroughness, this post follows up the discussion of "rome's the place she always goes" [SCity] (see BACK TO THE CITY above) with a look at three other parts of the song that are also linked to the Two Weeks. ***In describing the Narrator's time with the "rough riders on the wide open ranges" [SShoes] (see ROUGH RIDERS above), The Langelos mentions 1) that their rampage is fueled by pharmacy pills ("energy is courtesy of pharmacy pills" [Langelos]); 2) that they've knocked over multiple pharmacies along the way ("i think i hit another pharmacy" [Langelos]). Seeing this, it's not surprising to find that Eureka (already identified as a THS reflection of events during the time of Juanita's residence in the Summer House, see THE WEST above) combines the sleeping-in-random-places of this period with a reference to pharmacies, plural, in a single line: Sleeping in the parking lots of pharmacies [Eureka] This is consistent with other aspects of the original Langelos account, too: sleeping in random parking lots means waking up in random parking lots, which in turn agrees in principle with "woke up in the shrubbery" [Langelos]. ***But this detail from Eureka grabs our attention, because waking up in parking lots directly recalls the two important passages of Sherman City: she says we'll wake up tomorrow in the parking lot at rainbow but every time i see an eagle, it's a filthy fucking seagull grab my clothes and tap my toes i tell myself this ain't no place like rome [SCity] she says we'll wake up all bloody in the parking lot at friendly's but every time i chase a squirrel it rips apart my world i grab my clothes and blow my nose i sell myself this ain't no place to jones [SCity] The double "wake up ... in the parking lot" is an indication that these lines connect to the period of the Two Weeks. But how do we untangle them? ***The place to start is with the second passage; in every time i chase a squirrel it rips apart my world [SCity] we hear a deliberate echo of the new perfume counter girl tears apart my world [SGS] indicating that the Narrator is speaking during the time of Juanita's employment as the "perfume counter girl" in the Summer House (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above). He's chased her there ("squirrel" is slang for 'girl': gdict; see also the SGS rhyme); now he's getting his world ripped apart at the hands of the "rough riders" (see AHfA, and "i grab my clothes and blow my nose ... this ain't no place to jones"). The second passage, then, is firmly set against the background of the Two Weeks, which suggests that "the parking lot at friendly's" is built on the contrast between the Narrator's *actual* situation during the Two Weeks, and where he *wants* to be at that time: - in *actuality*, he's waking up a wreck in pharmacy parking lots with gangsters; whereas
- he *wants* to be waking up in the Jeep Encounter intimacy of the Kittson Street parking lot, down in the City, with Juanita.
This is strictly consistent with our understanding of the "rome's the place she always goes/ down on me" [Scity] passage, and with his instructions to Juanita, trying to get her to return to The City (for the identification of Friendly's as the brewery bar, see EAST VS MIDWEST above; for the Kittson Street lot as the parking lot of the brewery bar, see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above; for the Narrator's attempt to steer Juanita back there, see BACK TO THE CITY above). ***The reference to "the parking lot at Rainbow," then, is constructed in parallel with "the parking lot at Friendly's": it's a parking-lot framing of the place he ultimately wants to get to, the place he's wanted to be all summer long, namely, back with Juanita in smalltown suburban Minneapolis, scoring in the safety of the parking lot at Rainbow Foods. (Compare Southtown Girls, where the Rainbow Foods in whose parking lot the drug deal goes down is the one at 2600 American Blvd W in Bloomington, at the Southtown Mall. Again, waking up together is understood as a figure of intimacy; for a discussion of the relevance of this passage to the alpha-couple tensions of the Return Parties, see EAST VS MIDWEST above.) ***With these two passages now clearly set against the background of the Two Weeks, it's pretty clear that the opening line: now we live in domes [SCity] must refer to the situation of the Two Weeks as well: - "live" is consistent with descriptions elsewhere of the alpha girl's trap house residency (compare "pretty much living in/ a 3.2 bar" [Ambassador], "living on the west coast" [SBackwards]; for discussion, see THE WEST above).
- "we"/"domes" plural is consistent with the Narrator and Juanita's shared home base in the Summer House (identified by Sublet as the dome of the Pantheon in Rome; see DETECTIVE above), and their now shared goal of returning to The City (identified by Emperor as the dome of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome; see CHARLEMAGNE above).
***At the beginning of the thread (see CONVENTIONS above), I said I would mostly refrain from exploring rejected theories. But Sherman City is obscure enough that one question we've already answered seems worth the public exercise of a second look (plus we'll learn something about THS in the process). The question is this: If, as we've now shown, a substantial part of Sherman City is recounted from the perspective of the Two Weeks, what does that mean for the final two lines of the song? if we're really gonna wait, baby can't we take a shower look just like an otter when i push you underwater [SCity] We've already proposed that these lines --- the clearest description we have of the Narrator's attempt to drown Juanita --- refer to an event at the end of the period of the Return Parties (see UNDER WATER above); but we came to this conclusion without the support of a fixed link to a date. In light of everything else we've learned about Sherman City, we have to second-guess this conclusion: could it be that the assault takes place during a reunion in the course of the Two Weeks, rather than during the Return Parties? We've already made other arguments for consistency (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE and MAILBOX above) that make the Return Parties reading a pretty secure one; it would, for the rest, be difficult to square this assault, and the expectations of sex out of which it arose, with the Narrator's later focus on his mission of rescue. But there's also additional evidence, which we're only now (as of the Summer House/Two Weeks analysis) able to appreciate, that the drowning incident happened *before* Juanita's departure for the Summer House with the gangsters. This evidence is found in the LP shadow over the following verse of Yeah Sapphire: Yeah, Sapphire I know the last time we touched I came on a bit rough, please forgive me Yeah, Sapphire After you left, it was a big sketchy mess, they almost killed me [YS] The THS-timelines-and-arrows-taped-up-on-the-wall explanation for what's happening here, is that Sapphire is Mary's dream of herself when her body is occupied by Holly after the crucifixion (discussion of these points is all over the back end of Here Goes thread). This explanation is correct, as far as it goes. But the fact that both Holly and Mary are THS reflections of Juanita provides a much simpler and more intuitive account of Sapphire's identification with both girls. In terms of the *THS* narrative, "I came on a bit rough" [YS] in the first couplet obviously applies to Gideon drowning Holly, and "after you left" [YS] just as obviously applies to Holly leaving for the California. There's no doubt about which events are meant, but narratively speaking they're referred to out of order, weakening their force. But in terms of the *LP* narrative, the two events being alluded to --- the Narrator attempting to drown Juanita, and Juanita departing for the Summer House --- *do* happen in the stated order, and the dramatic crescendo from the first allusion to the second makes it clear that they are in fact related: as inferred earlier (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above), the fact that Juanita attends The LBI without the Narrator, leaving her vulnerable to the Kid From California, is itself a direct consequence of his earlier assault.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 7, 2021 7:59:08 GMT -5
I'm hanging on here, and it's still a thrill! Even with five posts per week, it's almost too much to take in in full, and I keep having these little thoughts and questions, and the forgetting about them. Gonna post a couple of them while they're still fresh in my mind. Some of them might be more linked to the THS story, but I think it's increasingly hard to separate the two universes. That's not your fault, I think you're doing a great job making it clear what belongs where. But still, in my mind, they bleed a little together at this point. And if some of this is tied up later in the thread, I'm totally fine with that! Thanks. I appreciate the hanging on ... now that we're deep in it, I can see that some of these long posts just to tie up a minor point are, ahem, a lot of reading, even if I need every brick to put the wall together. From my end I'll say that I'm really glad there's only 5 weeks to go :-) ... while slowing it down would have been good in some respects, it'll be a huge relief to have it off my back, and to be able to just point to the 6 summary posts and the final calendar and say, "ok, there it is." 1. California It's really interesting to see California/the west coast turn into a Minnesotian thing. I think it makes a ton of sense. But how does this affect the way Charlemagne use the phrase/motif in the THS story? Back in Here Goes you separated between Charlemagne's California (which was a metaphor for hitting the big time, the dream of finally achieving success) and Holly's California (which was a real place she actually went). Is this still a valid separation, or is it more likely that Charlemagne too is refering to a physical place when he talks about it ("Some borderline whore asked me how I was liking California/ I just cried")? I should probably state here that all my wrestling with the metaphors is aimed at one thing, namely, breaking through to an account of the literal story that holds up no matter what new metaphorical framings (which can be generated without end) Craig whips up on top of it. I'm really happy with the breakthrough to the literal LP story chronicled in these posts --- by the time we're finished here, we'll have a complete story, plausibly motivated throughout, with every lyric accounted for, and no recourse to supernatural forces. Thanks to its being a weird artificial remix of the literal LP story, the literal THS story doesn't really hit that bar, and so a question like this is hard to answer without leaving a door open to other answers. At a minimum, it definitely seems to me that: 1) the LP story: - uses "California" as an elevating-to-epic-status name for the geographical strip along US-169 in the western suburbs - uses *that* name in turn as a fulcrum for metaphors like - the Okies heading west from the dust bowl to the groves of California - kids from the midwest heading to Hollywood to become stars 2) the THS story: - uses "California" as an elevating-to-epic-status name for the geographical strip along US-169 in the western suburbs - uses *that* name in turn as a fulcrum for metaphors like - the prospectors heading west for the gold rush - kids from the midwest heading to Hollywood to become stars So far I think that's all very straightforward. The question is whether the THS story then *also* adds an allegorical usage (California understood as "making it big," apart from any geographic connection), on top of all the other things. That's just tough to answer. The fact that the THS story makes Charlemagne an "inside" character adds a whole new dimension to "making it big" that seems to need accommodating. The story element of Charlemagne and Holly leaving Lynn, Massachusetts to come west in a real and true geographic sense also seems to call for a broader understanding of the idea as well. It's thinkable that all of the THS places that I identified as allegorical --- Colorado=getting high, California=making it big, Massachusetts=state of hostility, etc. --- are just LP geographic locations that have been cut by the THS story remix from their original geographic coordinates, leaving only the metaphoric freight intact in a way that then looks a lot like allegory. I could probably be persuaded that that's the case, but I'd have to think it through. I will say that I don't think it makes any difference from the point of view of the underlying literal story, which is the main thing I want to get to; it's pretty simple to argue for each of these metaphoric meanings in context, even if the bigger picture of how they work as part of an ever-growing system of associations is hard to do with certainty. 2. The docks There's plenty of references to "the docks", "the harbour", or anything related to it, both in LP and THS. I don't have the full list in front of me, but just to take two examples I have in my head: Lie Down On Landsdowne and Hurricane J/Certain Songs, but also Lanyards. I got the impression from Here Goes that this was a reference to the place the sailors, the music boys -> the gangsters were hanging out. Somewhere Jesse went to make Charlemagne jealous, somewhere reminding Charlemagne of Holly's downfall. Then, in Lanyards, it seems very much connected to California and the (west) coast - that the maritime themes (see also Magazines and others) bleed a little bit together. That might be a deliberate thing from Craig's side, but it gets a little confusing to me. Don't really know what I'm asking here, but still, haha. This is another one that could be rethought. I'd always thought the docks/harbor references pivoted on the fact that the St. Paul harbor district (the northernmost harbor on the Mississippi) starts just below downtown, where the brewery is. But maybe the real fulcrum underlying these images is the idea of the "waterpark" in TMG, where "water"=meth; or maybe it's the literary trope of the docks as a down-and-out underworld setting --- compare I was down around the docks but I never saw anyone surfing From a distance it looked pretty much perfect but it's different in person [Lanyards] with these denver slums they look so good in text [SBackwards] Here again I think it's pretty easy to make an argument about where the metaphor is going. Real certainty about its genesis is a little harder to nail down. 3. The teachers/musicians Just wanted to add from upthread that there's two other musicians framed as teachers, or at least someone giving advise (which should qualify as the same thing here, right?) in Craig's lyrical world: Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten. In No Future, they're both described as guys the narrator takes advise from, and even the title of that song have a possible reference/antidote to Strummer's "The future is unwritten" (which, by the way, was the title of a documentary dropping in the midst of THS/right before Craig's solo endeavour). The combination of Mercury being gay, his advise ("If you can't beat them, join them") and his appearence in Knuckles too, seems especially significant. Again, not really a question, more of an observation on how the musician/teacher theme is potentially elaborated elsewhere. I'd completely missed this, that's amazing. My immediate thought is that there really does seem to be some kind of argument between the Narrator and the alpha girl out there in the west, an argument that pits his "come on, you can make a choice here, we can write our own future, let's go!" against her "there's no point" resignation: She said you get what you get when you push too far ahead They put us in these places for a reason Shaking your head with resignation masquerading as wisdom [FFarm] Both "No Future" and "if you can't beat them join them" seem to weigh in on her side of the argument. I don't want to say more than that in the way of interpretation without thinking about it more, but the pattern definitely seems to be there.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 6, 2021 2:04:00 GMT -5
BACK TO THE CITYThe "instructions" the-Narrator-as-Eyepatch-Guy leaves Juanita are a directive to her *to arrange to have the next Wednesday night party held back in The City* (see THE CITY above). The opportunity for this setup is provided, obviously enough, by the every-other-Wednesday-night schedule; but the means and motive for it are worth some additional comment. ***Regarding the means: The Narrator has every reason to expect that Juanita can do what he's asking. She's already successfully organized the Labor Day weekend costume party (see COSTUME PARTY and TWO AT A TIME above), setting a strong precedent. And the authority conferred on her by her status as belle of the ball is openly acknowledged; she's the queen of the clubs [HDaD] to whom the gangsters look for the spark of inspiration: They said, "You're the one who really makes it happen If you're ever on the West Coast give a shout" [HCamera] So the Narrator's premise --- that she can propose a location for the party with the expectation that the gangsters will follow her lead --- is a plausible one. ***Regarding the motive: First off, the Narrator *wants* to go back to The City. Compare the statement of the THS Narrator in CitM: She wont miss the city but she'll miss all her friends. I said "Vice versa for me, man. Vice versa for me" [CitM] We know he likes the "sweet view of the sunset" [TPProcedure]; but he also likes The City because, as of this point in the story, the two times they've been there are the two times Juanita's "[gone] down on [him]" --- the first time at Party Zero (see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above), the second time, unsuccessfully, at the end of The LBI (see JUST STARTED TALKING above): [*1] i know that rome's the place she always goes down on me, and it's not just gravity because i tell her things and things sound the way that james brown sings the sex machine i feel good now that you're gone [SCity] In other words, The City is part of his plan: if he can just get her down there and talk to her, he knows he'll be able to draw her in ("Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot" [SShoes]; see INSTRUCTIONS, and compare JUST STARTED TALKING and MAILBOX above). And this time, he knows she won't be afraid to come away. [*2]More detailed evidence of this motivation is found in Summer House, Bloomington, The Pirate And The Penpal, and Sublet. ***1) Summer HouseImplicit in the Narrator's remark at the end of the first verse of Summer House is that he wants Juanita to come back to The City: what do you mean you aint never coming back to the city [SH] In the next two lines, he adds a subtle reproach: My parents never got me a summer house we'd just sit here in the same house and we'd sweat it out [SH] As noted upthread, the word "here" indicates that the Narrator is calling from his parents' house in the suburbs (see TENNIS COURT above). But his emphatic reference to "the same house" sets up a second meaning, and a second contrast, in addition to the first. Why, he asks, does she have to go off to the "summer house" with the gangsters? What's wrong with "the same house" in which they've been partying in St. Paul? Note too the similarity between the Narrator's expression "sweat it out" [SH] here, and "ride it out" [TMG] and "slug it out" [LDoL] elsewhere. He's not denying that the brewery bar is a brutal environment; he's just willing to endure the brutality for the sake of another chance to get close to her, and to get her away. ***2) BloomingtonWe've already taken note (see THE WEST and STAR 18 above) of Juanita's comment about the Eyepatch Guy: his idea of fun is bloomington [Bloomington] This too suggests that he's trying to persuade her of the fun of a "club" scene *other* than the one where she is and he isn't (for "bloomington" and "megamall"=Nice Nice, see NIGHTCLUBS and STAR 18 above). ***3) The Pirate And The PenpalIn TPatP, the Narrator (as Eyepatch Guy) describes his conversations (by phone) with Juanita: told her all about the tighten up the way they used to dance down in houston, texas [TPatP] This isn't literal: the reference to the 1968 hit Tighten Up ("hi everybody, I'm Archie Bell, and the Drells, from Houston, Texas. We don't only sing, but we dance, just as good as we want": wikipedia) is, via "tighten up"='to give or sell narcotics to' ( gdict; compare "tightened up its tentacles" [HSL, RP]) and the "dance"=sex metaphor (see DANCING above), a coaxing reminder of the sex-and-drugs party scene down in St. Paul. [*3] ***4) SubletAgain, in Sublet, the Narrator (as Eyepatch Guy) ends with trying to persuade Juanita to return to the "city" and the "coney island" party scene, which is to say to The City in East St. Paul (see THE CITY, AIRPORT & LBI and THE EAST): angel have you ever seen the way these city slickers look i think they look incredible angel have you ever seen the way that coney island looks i think it looks incredible [Sublet] ***From the events that follow we'll learn that Juanita is successful in her mission to bring the party back to The City (see WE ALL WENT DOWN below). In the meantime, Me And Magdalena introduces evidence of her willingness to run with the Narrator's instructions. In the final verse, following the description of the kids' meeting with Shepard (see SHEPARD'S MANSION above), we're told: Last night Magdalena rang me really late. Said nothing ever works. Only so much I can take. If I make it back to Scranton can I clean up at your place? [M&M] The pieces of this picture are all familiar at this point: - "Magdalena": Mary (Mary Magdalene), the alpha girl.
- "rang me really late": this is one of their "constant correspondence" [BSam] phone calls, while she's at the Summer House and he's out with the "rough riders" (see INSTRUCTIONS above); she paged him, and he called her back.
- "nothing ever works": the drugs are less and less effective with time (see the note on "six feet tall" [TPatP] while she's at the Summer House in JUST STARTED TALKING above, and compare "decreasingly high" [Viceburgh], "that didn't seem like fifteen beers" [Hardware], "can't get as high as we got" [FN], "Dead receptors. Body limitations" [OwtB], etc.). "Only so much I can take" is meant *literally.*
- "If I make it back to Scranton can I clean up at your place?": she's ready now to do what she wouldn't do at The LBI, namely, to go home with him and clean up for good. She's asking whether she can have a do-over, if she brings the party "back" to The City (for "Scranton"=St. Paul/The City/The East, see GEOGRAPHY: THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS and FRONTAGE ROAD above).
[*1] The striking assertion that Juanita "always" goes down on him there, the second time being when she was wearing her "indian" costume in the back of the Jeep (see INDIAN FRINGES above), comes in for a surprising repeat in THS: Then she kicks off her moccasins The buckskin always sucks me in [Epaulets] [*2] The three phrases "sex machine," "i feel good," and "now that you're gone" are allusions to James Brown hits "Get Up (I Feel Like Being A) Sex Machine (Part 1)" ( link), "I Got You (I Feel Good)" ( link) and "Please, Please, Please" ( link) respectively. These allusions let us know that the verse is set during the Two Weeks, while Juanita is "gone" [LE, SH, SCity] at the Summer House; looking forward to the coming party, the Narrator feels confident that he can talk her into wanting to leave with him. [*3] Here, Houston is identified with the sex-and-drugs party scene of The City; but in the THS world of Teeth Dreams [Ambassador, RH], Houston is identified with NASA's Mission Control as the location of Gideon's "touchdown" ( heregoes). How can these two associations be reconciled? I have tableinthecorner to thank for figuring this one out: "the way they used to dance" [TPatP] correlates with "football dance" [TPatP] earlier in the song, and "touchdown" [Ambassador] confirms that a football metaphor is operative here. The gangsters are cast as the Houston Oilers of the mid-90's, where "oil"=PCP (see LISTED above), and "oilers" suggests "greasers" (see HESHERS above), exactly as they're elsewhere cast as the Dallas Cowboys ( heregoes), where "cowboys" suggests "drifters" (see HESHERS above). The NASA metaphor attaches to the Houston football metaphor in the same way that the Kennedy metaphor attaches to the Dallas football metaphor (and, as tableinthecorner notes, the Washington football metaphor, since the real-life Skins played at RFK stadium, named after the Kennedy who was shot at the real-life Ambassador). The trajectory that began after the Mission Party two weeks earlier is now coming down toward a landing.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 5, 2021 8:02:12 GMT -5
INSTRUCTIONSThe Narrator's familiarity with the Summer House (evident in the casual but detailed descriptions of Curves & Nerves, Eureka, etc.) and documented "days at a time" disappearances (see ROUGH RIDERS above) indicate that he does occasionally return to the Summer House during the Two Weeks. But most of his time is spent out "on the wide open ranges" [SShoes], and it's while he's out that one of the story's most important exchanges takes place. ***Blackout Sam begins with the description of a scenario that at this point is familiar: That winter we were dealing with unrest in the interior. Be careful when they mention local legends. He was down there in the trenches. She was holding down home office. Still in constant correspondence [BSam] There's no winter in the LP story; chalking that up either to THS transformation or to non-literal usage, we recognize the rest as a description of the kids' situation during the Two Weeks: - "unrest in the interior": reference to the "rough riders on the wide-open ranges" [SShoes] (see ROUGH RIDERS above).
- "be careful": compare "be careful of the second location," where this "second location"=the Summer House (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above).
- "local legends": the "local legend" with the "presentation" [Riptown] is identified by "presentation" [TPProcedure] as Shepard (for "they mention," see "They said you got to meet the guy that gets the tab for this" [TPProcedure], and RASTAFARI GUY above).
- "He was down there in the trenches": the Narrator out dealing/robbing/fighting as one of the gangsters (see ROUGH RIDERS above).
- "She was holding down home office": Juanita working back at the Summer House (see ROUGH RIDERS above).
The last line, "Still in constant correspondence," tells us something new: namely, that the Narrator and Juanita are still (after their exchanges during her first weeks at the Summer House; see MAILBOX above) in constant contact with each other. What does this "correspondence" consist of? ***As was the case before the Narrator joined the gang, Juanita no longer has anything to say to him in person (especially true after Shepard's demonstration, see SHEPARD'S MANSION above). This is inferable from Saddle Shoes, whose first mention of any alpha-couple communications comes at the party at the *end* of the "fifteen days"/Two Weeks: Later at some party all the girls want to talk a lot [SShoes] This same disinterest in talking to the Narrator is reported explicitly in Ask Her For Adderall (already unfolded as an account of the Two Weeks; see ROUGH RIDERS above): [*1] Now Holly won't say hi to me 'Cause I'm in love with my anxiety [AHfA] ***But Juanita *does* want to talk to the Eyepatch Guy. She may be doing bedfuls of gangsters while she's at the Summer House (see DETECTIVE above), but she's still obsessed with him: [*2] Said faithful has its limits I just want to see his face [FFarm] That she's here referring to the Eyepatch Guy is shown in the lines from Bloomington we examined earlier (see EYEPATCH GUY and MAILBOX above): i never saw his face, don't know who the man is he just puts his instructions into my mailbox [Bloomington] This is why Blackout Sam describes the alpha couple's communications as "correspondence": as detailed upthread (see MAILBOX above), they're communicating during the times he's out on the "ranges" [SShoes] by phone, using her voicemail and his pager to complete the circuit. ***This is, again, not the first time they've communicated via "mailbox" [Bloomington]; as demonstrated upthread (see EYEPATCH GUY and STAR 18 above), the phone call documented in Mono relied on the same elaborate mechanics. But the Eyepatch Guy didn't give her any "instructions" in the Mono call, which was in fact conspicuously content-free (see DEPARTMENT STORES above). Whatever instructions he gives to Juanita are imparted now for the first time. What are they? We want to start by clarifying what they are *not.* The insinuation of Bloomington, with its tight coupling to Star Wars Hips (see FIRST CONNECTIONS above), is that she's being directed to set "the nightclub fires" [SWH]; that is however *not* what's happening. Juanita is "interned" [SSC] in the Summer House, under "house arrest" [LQ]. She is not visiting the "clubs," neither to commit arson nor for any other reason. The Summer House, as a gathering-place of the Scene, is itself ambiguously a "club" (see NIGHTCLUBS above); but she isn't trying to burn the house down around her head, either. ***What is true is that the Narrator gets the *idea* for Juanita's participation in the schemes of the Eyepatch Guy around this time, when he observes that she *likes lighting fires*: [she] said ... the blue looks beautiful toppin' off the torch you don't have to go inside to buy, you can buy it off the porch [SSC] The context is significant: her adoration of the flame is followed in the next line by an allusion to her job in the Summer House ("transacting sacks to the yards from the porches" [LQ]; see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above), and in the line thereafter by an allusion to the detective's photo of her there ("twenty-seven lovers in the back half of the summer" [SSC]; see DETECTIVE above). This adoration isn't confined to Juanita in the LP world. Mary too loves the flames: She says she loves the way these little flames Make everything all black and grey. But sometimes all that smoke can make you sick. Still a scorch mark or a blistered hand Seems a whole lot better than Sitting around and waiting for the click [Epaulets] Note the allusions to boredom in "grey" and "sitting around and waiting for the click"; she does the drugs and lights the fires because she's bored (see BORED above). This allusion to "grey" boredom brings us back to the original recruitment scene of CaAoC: she said these sea-side towns they get pretty grey after labor day [CaAoC] What emerges here is that there's a temporal ambigiuity in "after labor day" that Craig is playing both ways. Juanita, already bored at the LBI, appears to be looking ahead with trepidation at the prospect of worse to come (see TWO AT A TIME above); but in fact she's speaking from *experience* of life in the Scene after Labor Day --- in other words, from experience of her dreary internship at the Summer House. We can conclude, then, that Eyepatch Guy's actual recruitment of Juanita as fire lighter: i been lookin for a fire lighter for hire do you like lightin fires, do you like lightin fires [CaAoC] *doesn't* happen during the Jeep Encounter (see JUST STARTED TALKING above); it happens later, after her departure for the Summer House, and after his plan to rescue her at the Mission Party has already failed. The fires are part of a *new* plan that he formulates after being jumped in, and after the Two Weeks are underway. The "instructions" pertain to the setup of that plan, rather than to the fires; what that setup entails, is the next item on the menu (see BACK TO THE CITY below). [*1] "Holly" here is Mary disguised as Holly; "anxiety" links her silence to the same "this is just what we wanted" critique that, according to Rock Problems, takes place during the THS version of the Mission Party ( heregoes; see LOOKING FOR K above). [*2] Note the symmetric Rolling Stones allusions in this line: "I Just Want To See His Face," the 13th track on Exile On Main St., cues us to understand "faithful" as a reference to Marianne Faithfull, whose early-70's addiction and homelessness ( wikipedia) is a figure of Juanita's own situation at this time.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 2, 2021 6:06:21 GMT -5
NOSEBLEEDThe release of ODP has given us just enough new information to link up another event that took place during the Two Weeks, on one of the occasions when the Narrator was personally present at the Summer House (see ROUGH RIDERS above). We know that the Kid From California isn't a good guy, and we know that the alpha girl doesn't discover that until after she's left with him to go to the Summer House: But the guy that she left with Ain't the things that he said he is. He's a dick when he drinks And she's scared of his friends [Eureka] I heard that kid from California turned out to be an asshole. I think I could have told you. You left with burning bridges but you never saw the beach [MINTS] We know, too, of at least one incident to justify her fear. Per 11AF, while she's away from home at the Summer House, after the detective takes the photo, something happens to her nose: made amends with your dealer friends the truth is in the camera lens so don't come home with a stick in your nose i hired a detective he's got a tiny camera juanita thinks she can skip the sleep the sun sneaks up on the boardwalk freaks maybe next time we get together the deviated septum will feel a little better [11AF] What exactly happened? A deviated septum "is most commonly caused by impact trauma, such as a blow to the face" ( wikipedia). Lanyards (explicitly situated in "California") lets us infer the missing bits: the alpha girl was in her room with the Kid From California (and/or his scary "friends" [Eureka]). They had a loud and violent fight. The Narrator tried to open the door, and found it locked: [*1] Banging on the door again She just wasn't answering Showbiz is a struggle, man [Lanyards] Others in the house, responding to the shouting, kicked in the door to find her bleeding profusely: [*2] When they kicked in the door They said, That's way too much blood for a nosebleed [Lanyards] So they called an ambulance, and took her to the hospital: [*3] Someone called an ambulance Straightened out her necklace And we sped to Good Samaritan [Lanyards] ***It's this incident that accounts for "the blood on the bed" [SPayne] and the corresponding description of the alpha girl's room at the THS version of the Summer House, i.e. The Ambassador: It was called The Ambassador She was pretty much crashing there. The space between the skin and all her blood [Ambassador] Not much diplomatic there, for sure. [*1] Final "again" in "Banging on the door again" [Lanyards] casts a look backward to the first time the Narrator found himself banging on the door trying to get through to her, namely on the threshold of the Party Zero bathroom (see A MESSAGE above). Note that "I haven't seen you since" [11AF] could be read as suggesting that the nose injury happens while Juanita is away at the Summer House, but *before* the Narrator is reunited with her; against that there's "Banging on the door again" and "we sped" of Lanyards, and the "kicked-in doors" of AHfA, to suggest that he's a present witness to the event. It seems to me that the latter reading is much stronger, and that "since" [11AF] can just be read to refer to the deviated septum incident itself, after which the Narrator heads out again with the other runners on the "wide open ranges" (see SHEPARD'S MANSION and ROUGH RIDERS above). [*2] The nose injury is characterized by Barfruit Blues as a consequence of Mary's indulgence in roofied drinks (which, distantly, it is): Mary got a bloody nose from sniffing margarita mix [BBlues] [*3] "Straightened out her necklace" [Lanyards] refers to the necklace with a cross that the alpha girl wears when she's trying to stay clean, but takes off when she's a bad girl hunting drugs (compare "Holly wore a cross to ward them off" [BCamp] vs. "that necklace she sold" [LID], and "She's got a cross around her neck ... She likes how it looks on her chest with three open buttons" [CatCT] vs. "We opened up three buttons/ But all we saw was desert trash" [MoC]). The implication is that the Narrator and the gangsters tried, for the purposes of the hospital visit, to make her *not* look like someone in the throes of heavy drug addiction. And apparently these measures worked, in that hospital staff not only treated her without getting law enforcement involved, but even freely prescribed her painkillers or some other meds with intoxicant value (we're told that her residence at the "family farm" is characterized by "a willingness to trade [her] medications" [FFarm]).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jul 1, 2021 7:54:14 GMT -5
ROUGH RIDERSThe principal THS songs that describe what *happens* during the THS Narrator's two weeks with the Skins are Saddle Shoes ( heregoes) and Ask Her For Adderall ( heregoes). The picture drawn by these songs is one of running around the city dealing drugs, doing drugs, engaging in acts of random violence, and sleeping wherever. Saddle Shoes: Shepard showed up when we were wrapping up the counting up He's coming off some problem block ... We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever ... Shepard showed up then somebody took a couple shots The neighbors went and called the cops ... I never rode a horse but I'm sleeping at the saddle shop Man this whole summer's been strange The Wild West begins where your body ends Rough riders on the wide open ranges [SShoes] Ask Her For Adderall: I'm living hand-to-mouth ... I've been sleeping on your couch ... I've been wasted since last week ... I almost died ... bloodshed in the streets ... the pinpricks and the throwing up ... ask her for some Adderall ... we're too far gone to deal ... don't tell her about the kicked-in doors ... we ain't even keeping score no more [AHfA] This THS account is consistent with what we know of the LP Narrator's two weeks with the gangsters from the Summer House, as described in The Langelos: street rats hanging out with the house cats i came from the dust bowl and i was looking for an orange grove and all i got was a bloody nose i came for the scenery and i woke up in the shrubbery i think i hit another pharmacy i've been through liquor stores and jewelry stores banks, tanks and music scores i've had busted scores, open sores and morning whores yourself to the night before can't you tell that these helicopters haunt me house cats making moves on the street rats and every single motel room is shady street rats making out with the house cats sending those boys up to the hollywood hills i said take what's yours energy is courtesy of pharmacy pills you know it feels so pure [Langelos] All the essential aspects of the THS experience are recapitulated in these verses: Experience | LP | THS | sleeping in random places | "shrubbery" [Langelos] | "saddle shop" and "wherever" [SShoes]; "on your couch" [AHfA] | injuries | "bloody nose" and "open sores" [Langelos] | "bloodshed" and "almost died" [AHfA] | getting fucked | "morning whores yourself" [Langelos] | "rough riders" [SShoes] and "living hand-to-mouth" [AHfA] | doing drugs | "energy is courtesy of pharmacy pills" [Langelos] | "wasted since last week," "pinpricks and the throwing up," and "ask her for some Adderall" [AHfA] | failed scores | "busted scores" [Langelos] | "ain't even keeping score" [AHfA] | motels | "every single motel room is shady" [Langelos] | "the counting up" [SShoes], compare "counted money in the motels" [SN] | robberies | "hit another pharmacy/liquor stores/jewelry stores/banks" [Langelos] | "kicked-in doors" [AHfA]? (doubtful in light of new ODP evidence; see NOSEBLEED below) |
***Evidently, then, "rough riders" [SShoes] has a double meaning: 1) The presence of "wild west" [SShoes] shows that this is, on the one hand, a reference to the cast of "Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World," a famous traveling Wild West show from the end of the 19th century ( wikipedia); the point of the allusion is to color the gangsters' rampage through the banks, liquor stores, pharmacies, and motels [Langelos, SShoes] of the towns of The West as the activity (a) of drifters (b) in a western setting (see HESHERS and THE WEST above). 2) The other sense of the term is provided by the allusions to mercenary sex ("morning whores yourself to the night before" [Langelos]; "I'm living hand-to-mouth" [AHfA]): [*1] the Narrator spends these two weeks being ridden by the gangsters, roughly. The misery of this hazing is apparently what Juanita has in mind when, in disdain/pity for the Narrator, she asks him why'd you have to try and go and join my crew [Bloomington] It also accounts for the Narrator's preoccupation with not showing weakness during this time: it's not just that he's putting up a brave front for the outside world ("don't tell her that we're living hand to mouth" [AHfA], etc.), but specifically that he's trying to appear less vulnerable in front of the other gangsters (compare his THS reflection in jumped-in Gideon, the softie who desperately wants to appear "hard" [Knuckles], and solo "Tryin' to seem a little hard" [Magic Marker]). ***The additional detail in this picture confirms our surmise about the "wherever" line from Saddle Shoes (see TWO WEEKS above): We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever [SShoes] Read in the context of the THS story, "we" refers to the THS Narrator and Charlemagne ( heregoes); read as a reflection of the LP story, "we" must be understood to refer to the one protagonist who's left once the alpha girl is excluded, namely, the LP Narrator. When the Narrator first returns from the Mission Party and is jumped into the gang, he hopes to stay with Juanita at the Summer House. But Shepard (the "billionaire" rich guy, see SHEPARD'S MANSION above) sends him out to work along with the rest of the gangsters instead: He said he's through with computers 'cause they can't understand The fawn in the traffic or the failures of man How a new billionaire in an Underdog shirt Built a statue to honor his ways and his words While the rest of these martyrs got marched off to work through the weekend [TPProcedure] That "marched off to work through the weekend" is literal is demonstrated by the account of Holly's time in The West in MINTS: I heard that kid from california turned out to be an asshole. I think I could have told you. You left with burning bridges but you never saw the beach. You had stars in your eyes but Modesto's not that sweet. When you only know one guy and he disappears for days at a time [MINTS] It doesn't matter whether we read the "one guy" she knows as a literal reference to the Kid From California, or a shadowed allusion to the LP Narrator, both of whom are on the scene at this stage of the story. What it tells us is that the rank-and-file gangsters are literally sent out to work for "days at a time" between reappearances back at the Summer House. So the street fights, drug deals, and pharmacy robberies are the Narrator's job, now; whereas Juanita's job is to work as the "perfume counter girl" (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above) and provide sexual service back at home base. [*2] Or again: I never rode a horse but I'm sleeping at the saddle shop And so are most of my friends [SShoes] The Narrator's out "wherever" with *most* of his friends, i.e. the gangsters. But his most important friend is the one who's still back at the Summer House. ***After recounting the Narrator's capture at the Mission Party and induction into the gang, Rock For Lite Brite (see CARGO VAN and RASTAFARI GUY above), referring to his time in The West with the "rough riders," says: then it all became like an action/adventure [RfLB] This characterization is paralleled by Holly's departure for the "west coast" in pursuit of "adventure": She never thought it was love. It was mostly about the adventure [Eureka] as well as by Multitude Of Casualties: And after your party we got off the grid ... Yeah, we were hoping for an action adventure [MoC] Like many of the passages we've been looking at, these lines in MoC can be read two ways. In the context of the THS story, they refer to Gideon and Holly living the motel/mall drug-dealing life (see TWO WEEKS above) with the Skins after Holly's birthday/costume party. But in the context of the LP story, they refer to the period after Juanita's costume party/The LBI (see COSTUME PARTY above), which is precisely when they "got off the grid" to head west for this period of The Summer House/Two Weeks. [*1] At this point, most of the "don't tell her/just tell her" lines in AHfA can be clearly understood as the THS Narrator's instructions to Charlemagne to avoid revealing to Jesse that their lives amount now to uninterrupted personal violations and drug whoredom: "bloodshed" and "too far gone to deal" are self-explanatory, while "hand to mouth," "sleeping on your couch," "love ... and respect" (see THS REVISITED above), "almost died," "pinpricks ... throwing up," and even "kicked-in doors" (see NOSEBLEED below) all have strong precedents indicating reference to fucking gangsters for drugs. Which leaves just the last of the list: If she asks just tell her that we opened for the Stones It's her favorite band except for The Ramones [AHfA] This is a pair of lines that's caused a lot of speculation, due to the obvious real-world reference to The Hold Steady opening for the Rolling Stones at Slane Castle in 2007 ( link). It seems to me that there's a double meaning here, too: besides telling us that it's the Narrator (the "band"; see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT and NEWSPAPERS above) speaking, and that he's talking about music-loving Jesse, the reference to the Slane Castle concert puts an in-narrative mask of decency over another allusion to sex-for-drugs exchange: - for the sexual sense of "opened," compare "the new girls are coming up like some white unopened flowers" [JaJ] ("we opened up three buttons" [MoC] could arguably also be included).
[*2] Again, this division of labor is what's being described in the opening verse of Traditional Village (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above): Everyone has such an important position When you're living in a traditional village [TVillage] There are scenes from the brewery bar in this song (see SHORT BY AN OUNCE and COMMEMORATIVE PLATES above), but the overt sense of "traditional village" (like "family farm" [FFarm]; see SHEPARD'S MANSION above) is a reference to the Summer House. From this, it seems likely that the second verse of the song: The waiter walked up with his arm in a sling. The doctor says it's sort of suspicious. Pretty sure that he's not even injured. He's just fishing for another prescription [TVillage] is also a description of a scene from the Two Weeks, from one of the occasions on which the Narrator revisits the Summer House. Per the "waitress" metaphor (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above), the "waiter" must be one of the gangsters who's running the operation out of the house itself. This is consistent with the following lines from Going On A Hike, which we've already identified as one of the principal songs describing this chapter of the story (see TWO WEEKS above): It's not funny that you used my name So you could get another prescription [GoaH] The Narrator is the "new kid" [BCrosses, MPADJs] in the gang, the "rich kid ... far up on jefferson" [MiM]; it's entirely plausible that one of the cleverer gangsters would try to exploit his identity in order to get a prescription of pain meds.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 30, 2021 8:15:25 GMT -5
TWO WEEKSSo begins the fifth chapter of the Lifter Puller story, which, after the lyrics of The Gin And The Sour Defeat, we'll call the Two Weeks. Like it says on the tin, this Two Weeks covers a period of exactly "two weeks" [TGatSD]. Why? Because the Mission Party at which the Narrator gets caught to begin the chapter is one of the "every other Wednesday night" [CRoom] parties (see LOOKING FOR K above), and now he's waiting for the next one in order to make his next move: hey rastafari heard you're quittin school smoking weed and cleaning swimming pools ... waiting on the wednesday shipment [RfLB] ***The Narrator's specification of "two weeks" [TGatSD] includes some additional descriptive detail: two weeks maybe we should sleep [TGatSD] which lets us recognize its reflection in THS' Teenage Liberation: He stayed up for sixteen nights at a stretch, he was wrecked [TL] Let's take a minute to connect the dots around these lines. Upthread, we've linked the TL "sixteen nights" lyric to the Eyepatch Guy (see CHARLEMAGNE above); in Here Goes, we linked the same line to the two weeks that the THS kids spend among the Skins in the run-up to the Crucifixion showdown ( heregoes). In other words, the "two weeks" [TGatSD] that follow on the heels of the LP Mission Party are the LP original of the "couple of weeks" [GoaH] that follow on the heels of the MPADJs/RP party in THS. Like the later THS version, the LP Two Weeks are in essence a stretch of sex, drugs, frenetic criminality, and sleeplessness through which our heroes are just trying to hang on until their plans to turn the tables on the gangsters can come to fruition. The principal evidence that there's a THS analogue to these "two weeks" [TGatSD] is found in three sources ( heregoes): Teenage Liberation ("sixteen nights"), Saddle Shoes ("fifteen days"), and Going On A Hike ("couple of weeks"). It's worth revisiting all three songs for the perspective they afford on the Two Weeks in Lifter Puller, as well. ***1) Teenage LiberationWe've already looked at this once (see CHARLEMAGNE above), but to review: 'Twenty-nine' was the end of the line He stayed up for sixteen nights at a stretch, he was wrecked You could see all the veins in his neck when he flexed [TL] All of the detail here is relevant to the LP story. We are in the final stretch before the "end of the line," when the Eyepatch Guy, alluded to via his "veins in his neck" framing as The Hulk (see CHARLEMAGNE above), will return to burn down the Nice Nice in The Flex And The Buff Result (the same exercise of vengeful rage that's referred to in "flexed" [TL]). ***2) Saddle ShoesMany aspects of Saddle Shoes that were obscure in a THS context are suddenly clear when read as referring to the LP story: We still sleep at the saddle shop It's been that kind of summer We tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever She appeared faithless in fringes and feathers It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever [SShoes] The "saddle shop" appears to be a literal reference to the Schatzlein Saddle Shop at 413 Lake Street, and that's how I treated it in the Here Goes discussion ( heregoes). But what I'd missed there is that "saddle" is yet another ambiguous metaphor for drugs and sex, being on the one hand slang for ketamine ( urbandictionary), and on the other hand slang for sex/pussy ( gdict; gdict). In other words, the "saddle shop" is simply another place where kids "connect" (see SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORS above), another of the gathering places of the Scene (see NICE NICE above). It's a different place than the Summer House, where Juanita is (as indicated by "tried to stay with your sister now we're staying wherever" [SShoes]); it seems to be a temporary location ("Didn't make a difference when the owners came and changed the locks" [SShoes]); but it's definitely a gang bivouac, complete with the vices that entails. This is a strong fit for the concrete realities of the LP story, much stronger than anything that appears in the haziness of the THS story at this stage. Similarly, the Schatzlein Saddle Shop and neighboring Yukon Club on Lake Street, while they do fit the explicitly western theme of the song, are only superficially motivated as a "wild west" locale in THS; whereas their status as waystations of the "parade/ from uptown through the old arcades" [Feelers] driving in from the towns of The West is deeply integral to the LP story, and makes for a much better fit. The scene described in these lines is explicitly set at summer's end ("It's been that kind of summer"); what's being said is that the drugs-for-bjs gangster life the kids are leading is the same one they've been leading all summer. Again, this applies much more clearly to the LP story than it does to the THS story (this same "summer" gave me problems in the Here Goes thread, now it's clear why: heregoes). The onstage presence of "Holly" [AHfA]/"Esther" [Esther] during this part of the story makes "we tried to stay with your sister" awkward for THS purposes, too. [*1] But it's a very clear fit for the LP circumstances: the Narrator, having been brought back to the Summer House with Juanita and jumped into the gang, wants to stay there, where she is, but instead is sent out to work the arcades and the malls with the rest of the gangsters (see ROUGH RIDERS below). He sees her on occasion when they return to base, but the theme of these weeks is one of protracted separation. [*2]***3) Going On A HikeThe western theme of GoaH is, again, a strong fit for the LP metaphor of The West: Yeah, there's blood down in the valley We come in to the prairie Waiting out in the heat A couple motels and a couple saloons They can eat a couple of weeks up I saw a small town parade and the lead majorette She made me feel all weak in the knees [GoaH] There are many connections here to the present moment in the Lifter Puller story: - We get the western framing of bars as "saloons."
- We get "motels," which again links back to pairing with the "malls" (see THE WEST above).
- The THS kids are described as "waiting," like the LP Narrator "waiting on the wednesday shipment" [RfLB]; "eat a couple of weeks up" indicates that they're literally biding their time waiting for two weeks to pass.
- We get a likely reference to US-169 towns Golden Valley in "valley" and Eden Prairie in "prairie" (see WEST COAST above).
- We get another reference to the gangster runners' cars and to Juanita in "a small town parade and the lead majorette" (see RASTAFARI GUY above).
***In short, THS' "two weeks" is a definitive relic of the LP story. Note, in closing, two things about these lines' accounting for time, which is very precise: - The statement "it's been fifteen days" is made at a time when the Narrator is still waiting, and not yet at the end of his insomniac stretch, which began the last time the Narrator slept properly before the launch of his action/adventure (see CARGO VAN above), that is, *before* the Mission Party.
- The statement "he stayed up for sixteen nights at a stretch" is made from an omniscient perspective, and represents the total number of nights between the last time the Narrator slept properly, and the first time he slept afterwards.
These points will be important when we come to sort out the remainder of the LP calendar (see CALENDAR: THIRD PASS below). [*1] "Your sister" [SShoes] can be read by the light either of the THS story or the LP story: it can be understood to refer to Holly, insofar as Mary spends these two weeks masquerading as her cousin ( heregoes); it can also be understood to refer to Katrina, insofar as Juanita is now in a perpetual drug-affected state (see LOOKING FOR K above). [*2] For details of the Narrator's occasional reappearances at the Summer House, see ROUGH RIDERS and NOSEBLEED below.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 30, 2021 6:46:47 GMT -5
Little to add here, but I keep coming back to a general point, which might be to general to really matter, and also not 100% though through. But I get a feeling that both of Craig's new beginnings as an artist - Almost Killed Me and Clear Heart Full Eyes - focus in more on the core story from Lifter Puller than subsequent THS- and solo releases. Almost Killed Me is obviously filled with stories about the new characters, and the story arc they're going through. But a lot of this comes even more into focus on Separation Sunday and (I would argue) on Stay Positive, while Almost Killed Me at a surface level is more concerned with "the kids" in general. I can't really quantify this, and there's plenty of lyrics, lines, verses and songs who's very much at the core of the THS narrative too. But I still feel it contains more parts who sounds like mirrors of the Lifter Puller story than the albums coming after it. Clear Heart Full Eyes even more so. There's entire songs on this record who doesn't really connect all that well with the THS stuff, but fits pretty perfect with the core LP story. On the later solo albums, I get the feeling that Craig more deliberately have written short stories with different characters, allthough they too share characteristics with know characters, or experience stuff compatible with the characters in the LP/THS narratives. But songs like No Future, Terrified Eyes, Balcony (and others) sounds a lot more in sync with a (not the) narrator suffering betrayal and despair, losing someone he care about to someone else. It could be heard as a more generic way to write songs, even more personal, but with the LP story laid out here, I think it's hard not to draw comparisons between them. It's almost like Craig, at the beginning of a new thing, starts out with different takes on the very first core story, and then elaborate from that - and the further we get away from the new start, the more "unique" the lyrical style of that project seem to get. The major exception here is (again, to me, and mostly rooted in a feeling more than hard facts or numbers) Open Door Policy, which sounds a lot like Craig putting LP story events into the THS world. I guess it started in the TTTP era (another new beginning, in many ways), but it's even more visible on ODP. These are good thoughts, and I agree emphatically with some of them. I've got a post, THS CHARACTERS, coming up at the end that deals pretty thoroughly with the THS side of the question (once we've reached the end of the LP story and have the evidence of the complete thing to work with). The solo stuff, I haven't got a comprehensive theory of. I've never sat down, looked at all of it, and tried to account for it in any complete way, the way I have with LP and THS --- besides the fact that it's just a daunting prospect (so much material, so much work to study it all!), I don't have any *reason* to believe that he's doing any kind of systematic thing with it, so I've never looked for one. Instead, I've just taken bits here and there that have too much apparent relevance to chalk up to chance (bits from Western Pier, No Future, Wild Animals, Indications, etc.), and have thrown those on the pile of perspective fragments. But you're right that it would be worth taking a survey of those bits once I'm done, and seeing if any themes or trends emerge. I'm making a mental note to come back to this at the end.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 29, 2021 6:31:54 GMT -5
RASTAFARI GUYSo the Narrator is initiated into the gang, and joins the other runners as they drive back out "to work through the weekend" [TPProcedure]: The sweet parade the morning brings The drifters wearing angel wings [Feelers] We know that the "parade" refers to the gangsters' cars, thanks to Spices' description of them leaving what looks like the Kittson Street lot after The LBI (with cars, cops, and kisses): She slept over on a Saturday night And in the morning we watched the parade All the majorettes had the sun in their eyes And all the old cars looked fatigued The cops in the kilts had me nervous as hell But it felt pretty cool when she kissed me [Spices] This account of the "parade" is consistent with the portrait of the gangsters bringing their supply from the periphery towns into Minneapolis where the money is (see THE WEST above), starting in Uptown and spreading east from there: Each daybreak there's a new parade From uptown through the old arcades [Feelers] ***The launch of the Narrator's new life as a gangster is described in Rock For Lite Brite: you got a bong you call the babylon you picked the name up from a bad brains song hey rastafari heard you're quittin school smoking weed and cleaning swimming pools [RfLB] The Rastafari Guy is the Narrator: the kid who bonds with Juanita in liking "hardcore" [SBackwards] is the same one who likes Bad Brains. But what else is going on in these lines? ***The bong is called the "Babylon" after the Bad Brains song "Destroy Babylon" on the album Rock For Light (the same album on which the song "Right Brigade," referenced in Touch My Stuff, appears). In the Bad Brains canon as in the Bible, Babylon is the city of vice and corruption, like Lifter Puller's Rome; the allusion to "Destroy Babylon" is another token of the Narrator/Eyepatch Guy's meditation on retribution (see CHARLEMAGNE above), and his budding plan to send "the Nice Nice up in blazes" [TFatBR]. ***What "smoking weed and cleaning swimming pools" means, we don't need to guess: as already noted, "pool" is slang for a meth den (see DRUG SLANG above) and "clean" is a metaphor for sucking dick (compare "cleaning freak" [OWL], "i'll do anything but clean" [RP]; see THS REVISITED above); this line is a ganja-dropout variation on the usual "doing drugs and blowing dealers" theme. ***But the interesting new bit of information here is "quittin school" [RfLB]. Surely the Narrator isn't literally in school? What is this actually describing? The Narrator is not, in fact, in school; like in Emperor, "quittin school" here is a trope, a metaphor for "dropping out" of society in general. But to be able to drop out, he must be engaged in some kind of regular activity in the first place, and in fact, there are several reasons to believe that the Narrator has a job, namely: - He has a car (the Jeep), which requires money (see RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above. Anyone who's worked in one of the US' big cities in the last decade of insane rent hikes knows that living in your car and holding down a job are not at all mutually exclusive; it's a time-honored way to make the paycheck go farther. It's particularly doable if you're in your 20s, and your parents have a house nearby that you can retreat to [SH]).
- He's got an expensive drug habit; the THS Narrator's version is "a hundred dollars a day" [SM].
- Per the solo evidence, "the detective was expensive" [Blankets], and there's no reason to believe that this isn't true of the LP version as well.
- We've already talked about the Narrator being written as an alter-ego Craig, and specifically about the fact that the Eyepatch Guy's investor story is based on 24-year-old Craig's job as a financial broker for American Express in Minneapolis (see NEWSPAPERS and EYEPATCH GUY above).
- A state of regular employment is consistent with our inference regarding "the first week" and "monday" in the calendar calculations upthread (see CALENDAR: SECOND PASS above); up to this point in the story, the Narrator's "week" has been the workweek, and "monday" the day the weekend is over.
- Ten-plus years on, "The office girls are offering their take on what went wrong with him" [Spectres] still can't be connected to anything else in the THS lyrics; but it fits right in with the story of a LP Narrator who's continued at his office job while falling into meth addiction, up until the point he finally crashes out and disappears.
***It remains to be asked: where does the Rastafari framing come from, exactly? Thanks to Steve (see ORIGINS OF IMAGES above) and to @skywaywalker and eyepatchgary (see HESHERS above), it's confirmed that the gangsters' identification with crust punks comes with a connotation of dreadlocks. The fact that the Narrator has now joined them in their drifting and dealing (see also ROUGH RIDERS below) is, in principle, enough to account for the "rastafari" handle. But why are we hearing about rasta and dreadlocks only at this point in the story? At Party Zero, the same gangster longhairs were literal "heshers," with emphasis on their love of heavy metal and thrash, as opposed to rasta (see HESHERS and ON THE FLOOR: MUSIC above). What's different now? [*1]The main difference is the presence of Shepard himself. Shepard didn't attend the weekenders at the brewery bar; he's the "local legend" [BSam, Riptown] who's referred to in absentia up on the roof: [*2] There were some dudes on the roof deck that were sitting with a sweet view of the sunset They said you got to meet the guy that gets the tab for this Anything you want he can cover it [TPProcedure] and though he supervises the Wednesday night parties ("glitter on his face" [Feelers]), he's not accessible there either, not until the party is over: Now while you're here in person I was kind of, sort of hoping [Feelers] Shepard is older than the gangsters working under him: He's paranoid and he's obsolete [LA] He said he's through with computers 'cause they can't understand [TPProcedure] The idea that it's the grunts who are into metal and thrash, but Shepard who's into rasta, seems to be supported by the evidence of Star 18: I know we made plans to meet in Spokane But the way I make plans you gotta take it with a grain of salt. ... Sorry I'm late I got caught in a mosh. With this dude who said he used to play with Peter Tosh. But he never brought it up again. Once I said man I don't believe you [Star18] Here, the Narrator starts by apologizing to the alpha girl for failing to pull off their meeting in The West as planned (for the established pattern of the Narrator's "plans" gone wrong, see A LITTLE BIT above); the reason is that he "got caught," repeating verbatim the RfLB account of his Mission Party screwup (see CARGO VAN above). [*3]Then he describes the guy who caught him. If there's one individual, as opposed to the collective "sharks" with "dogs out in the parking lot" [RfLB], who gets the credit for catching him, that can only be their leader, Shepard; which would make Shepard the one claiming an association with Rastafarian Peter Tosh. If Shepard's "musicianship" consists in playing people and pulling their strings with drugs in exchange for sex (see SHEPARD'S MANSION above), and "bring it up" is code, as it is in Feelers and Heavy Covenant, for the proposition of that same exchange, then the Narrator would appear to be saying that he broke Shepard's power to control him when he dissented from The Future Is Now: again, ... he never brought it up again. Once I said man I don't believe you [Star18] This reading is consistent with the THS Narrator's MPADJs attempt to persuade Mary to stop "playing" other peoples' figurative "music" ("baby take off your beret" [MPADJs]), and to seize control of her own future instead ( heregoes). [*4]***There's one last Rastafarian detail which we're finally in a position to explain, namely Gideon's statement: He said I got to the part about the exodus And up to then I only knew it was a movement of the people [CatCT] This reference to Bob Marley's "Exodus" ("Exodus, Movement of Jah people!": link) is now confirmed to be made in analogy to the "displacement" of The Prior Procedure; as Craig says ( link): The Bad Brains songs "Leaving Babylon" ( link) and "Destroy Babylon" ( link), referred to in Rock For Lite Brite, refer in their turn to the lyrics of "Exodus" ( link): We're leaving Babylon We're going to our Father land The alpha couple are like the Israelites of the Exodus, displaced from home, enslaved, and wandering with the drifters in the desert of The West. More on this shortly (see ROUGH RIDERS below). [*1] If Wikipedia's description of Kiss as a heavy metal band ( wikipedia) is taken at face value, then the story's sudden shift from heavy metal/thrash to rasta/crust punk themes is exactly what is described in the opening lines of Me And Magdalena: But the boys that we'd been twisting with suddenly got wildly inconsistent. Like first they're into Kiss and then they're into crust [M&M] [*2] Against this there's the line from Look Alive: "Man, I've seen him destroy a dude before" [LA], which still seems likely to identify Shepard as the one who beat up Charlemagne at the metal bar party. But like the kids getting a ride to the THS version of the Mission Party with a dealer (see ESTHER above), this looks like an artifact of the original THS plot remix (see THS CHARACTERS below). [*3] "I got caught in a mosh" [Star18] makes ambiguous reference both to thrash metal and rasta; "Caught in a Mosh" is the name of an Anthrax song (thrash metal), while the term "mosh" itself is credited to both H.R. of Bad Brains (rasta/hardcore) and Vinnie Stigma of the Agnostic Front (thrash; wikipedia). As with Milkcrate Mosh ("surrendered in the corner" [MM]; see PARTY ZERO above), the reference is to a gangrape --- this time to the second gangrape of the story, when the Narrator, having got caught at the Mission Party, gets jumped in (see CARGO VAN above). [*4] The suggestion here is that a "dj," in the LP/THS universe, is not just someone who follows the command of someone else's tune, but is also specifically a dick sucker (a "dick jockey"?); The Ballad Of The Midnight Hauler seems to confirm this reading (compare the slang expression "haul [ashes/rocks]"='give sexual pleasure': gdict; gdict). The Midnight Hauler is a drug addict: - "He was a TNT trucker": "TNT"='heroin+fentanyl' (ondcp)
- "100,000 watts of power": meth (for "power"=speed, compare "all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN], and see TWO TWENTIES above)
- "he set the needle down on 'It's Time For Me To Fly'": reference to shooting up
- "he's still a pretty speedy guy": "speed"=meth/amphetamine (see LISTED above)
The Midnight Hauler services the guys who run drugs through the gauntlet of "Weather, gas, cops, and whores" [TBotMH]; he brings them "comfort": When a trucker needed comfort, he'd play that song right away [TBotMH] including, for example, to "frustrated" "Dick": So this goes out to Denver Dick He's feeling all frustrated up on I-seven-six [TBotMH]
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 28, 2021 7:29:11 GMT -5
SHEPARD'S MANSIONFor the purposes of this thread, the number one benefit to having had ODP released just now is that we get The Feelers. Like Esther, it's a THS song, but it might as well be a direct account of what happens after the LP kids arrive at the Summer House early in the morning after the Mission Party. Why and how that's the case, we'll discuss when we wrap up the thread (see THS CHARACTERS below). But in the meantime, let's look at what it tells us about the kids. *** It was an early morning meet-up at the mansion up the mountain The Maestro still had glitter on his face They led us to the office and once my eyes adjusted I took a little look around the place [Feelers] First: the Maestro is Shepard [ABlues, IHTWTDFY, SShoes], leader of the gang. The *published* lyrics of the Feelers have "The shepherds" for "Shepard," "The cowboys" for "The cowboy," "This scene" for "The Scene," and "The pirates" for "The pirate"; but as we saw when we crowdsourced the lyrics of the Massive Nights V live performance, and as many other details in the song confirm, it is in fact "Shepard," "The cowboy," "The Scene," and "The pirate" (for detailed argument see NICE NICE above). The mansion is "Shepard's mansion" [ABlues]. It's "up the mountain" in the sense of being a place to get high (for the metaphor, see CONVENTIONS above). It's the Summer House. [*1]It's a "meet-up" in the same sense as the "meeting" reported in Star 18: [*2] Once upon a time I had a meeting with a man in a mansion. He pulled a few strings just to demonstrate how it's all connected [Star18] Shepard is "the man in the mansion." (More about "pulled a few strings" in a minute.) Finally, it's an "early morning" meet-up, and he's still got "glitter on his face," because the gang has just returned to base after the Wednesday night Mission Party where the kids were apprehended ("they led us"; see CARGO VAN above). *** On the mantle was a portrait of his father and the fortune He'd amassed from being ruthless but polite And a bottle with a model, a specific British clipper ship On his desk there was a pistol and a pipe [Feelers] There's a lot going on here, metaphorically. This is the verse that establishes the double meaning of "Open Door Policy": Shepard keeps the door open for the kids to come into his Hotel California, as it were; see Craig's note on The Prior Procedure ( link): At the same time, the "British clipper ship" reference establishes the link to the historical Open Door Policy ( wikipedia) associated with the First Opium War and British opium-running, via clipper ship, to China ( link). Just as the historical Policy was an American insistence on keeping China open for trade with any nation, so the other side of Shepard's welcome is an insistence on the openness of his drug market to all comers ("Everybody rise, we're an American business" [OwtB]). The "pistol and a pipe" sound genteel, but refer to the hard edge of the drug trade: the "pipe" is a drug pipe, and "pistol" is as likely (see SHOT IN THE SHOULDER above) to refer to a needle and syringe as it is to refer to a handgun. As for the "specific" British clipper ship: this can only be the Ambassador ( wikipedia). We've noted repeatedly (see NICE NICE above, etc.) that the "3.2. bar a stretch to call a club" Ambassador of the Teeth Dreams song is associated with the brewery bar; here, we find the same name associated with the Summer House. This is the second time (see LOOKING FOR K above) that we're seeing the brewery bar and the Summer House superimposed on one another in reference to Juanita's "living" quarters; we'll examine this striking pattern in its own right shortly (see CANDY'S ROOM below). ***The story continues in the second verse: Now while you're here in person I was kind of, sort of hoping I could ask you 'bout a girl I met last night She had the aura of an angel But she had a couple problems I guess the big one is she's someone else's wife And she didn't bring it up with any sort of plan in place She said she was just putting out the feelers When she asked if she could choke you Underneath the blacklight poster With a spaceman saying, "Take me to your dealer" [Feelers] Finding himself face-to-face with the guy who runs the Scene, the Narrator asks him, carefully, about Juanita, with whom he was finally reunited last night at the Mission Party (for "aura of an angel" compare "her aura is amazing" [Esther], also a description of Juanita at the Summer House; see ESTHER above). He explains that she's his girlfriend ("someone else's wife"), and that when she offered to blow the anonymous gangster ("asked if she could choke you"; compare "choke the chicken" and variant expressions for jacking off: gdict, urbandictionary) back in the Kittson Street lot (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above), she was just exploring what she could get from him in exchange ("putting out the feelers" in the negotiation sense, with a creeping-things insect pun: ahdict), not proposing to be taken off to captivity in the Summer House ("didn't bring it up with any sort of plan in place"; "take me to your dealer"). In short, on the grounds that it wasn't really her intention to come and stay here, he asks for Juanita's release. ***Shepard's reaction is a simple demonstration: Once upon a time I had a meeting with a man in a mansion. He pulled a few strings just to demonstrate how it's all connected [Star18] What "connect" means, referring both to making a connection with a dealer and connecting sexually, we know (see DRUG SLANG above); like "puppeteer" [C&N] Charlemagne, but at a much bigger scale, Shepard is the "Master of Puppets" [DH] who pulls people's strings --- always, in Star 18, C&N, and BCamp, the strings of a girl like Holly --- with drugs. (This the reason for the bizarre emphasis on "a cord to connect it" in the Denver Haircut couplet with "Master of Puppets"; the clock radio on Juanita's bed stand is framed as the cord that tethers her to the Summer House, the string by which she's "connected"; see CANDY'S ROOM below.) Shepard offers Juanita a hit; Juanita drops right down on her knees. [*3] You see, he says to the Narrator: I've got an open-door policy; she's just taking advantage of it. She *wants* to be here. In other words, "Open Door Policy" has a double meaning: - it's the informal but still sketchy social policy described by Craig during Massive Nights V as (paraphrasing) "party at my house any time, as long as you bring some chicks";
- it's also the formal economic policy of keeping a market open for trade (wikipedia).
Shepard's maintaining an open market. Juanita's there for the exchange. That exchange happens to be a "pretty heavy covenant/ To make with someone powerless" [HCovenant]; but she's there for it. For the social policy, compare what's said in The Prior Procedure (here "He"=Shepard; note also "family" --- the "family farm" is the Summer House): He said large scale displacement is such a major modern tragedy That's why I instituted this open door policy Been thinking about kicking off some new kind of family I'm really glad that you're here [TPProcedure] For the economic policy, compare what Craig himself says about the song in the "really rich guy" quote above ( link). ***So Juanita won't be leaving, not because Shepard won't let her go, but because she doesn't want to go. What about the Narrator? The open door policy applies to him as well as to Juanita: he's free to go if he wants. The solo song Western Pier describes a scene that we can't fail to recognize as this very conversation, in The West of the LP/THS world: I spent seven months in another town At night I'd walk down on the beach One night I saw them watching me They rolled up. They put the cuffs on Then they drove me deep into the valley The just judge looked me over and said I'm sorry You don't have to keep running But you best be leaving [Western Pier] - "I spent seven months in another town": the precise arc of the Lifter Puller story (see CALENDAR: THIRD PASS below).
- "At night I'd walk down on the beach": the parties of the Scene ("jones beach" [SCity], "jersey shore" [LSifL], "the LBI" [Manpark], etc.; see AIRPORT & LBI above).
- "One night I saw them watching me": the Mission Party, when the Narrator got caught.
- "They rolled up. They put the cuffs on/ Then they drove me deep into the valley": the Narrator was apprehended and taken in the cargo van to the Summer House (see CARGO VAN above; for "valley," see THE WEST above).
- "The just judge looked me over and said I'm sorry": this is Shepard (compare his framing as Just Judge=Jesus=savior=dealer later in the song; compare also "Love's been such a letdown" [Western Pier] to Shepard's "Love will tear us apart" [TPProcedure], see WALKED IN above).
- "You don't have to keep running/ But you best be leaving": you don't have to become a drugrunner in the gang (see DRUG SLANG above); but if you don't, you need to leave, and you'd be better off leaving.
To this, the Narrator makes a reply which he explains, elliptically, in the next verse: You can't take away all the parts of you That make you do the things you do The girls that live inside my heart Keep coming up the boulevard [Western Pier] He can't not be how he is; Juanita's still in his heart, and he can't leave her. ***So the Narrator agrees to become a runner in the gang. The first chorus documents Shepard's explanation of how the business works: The sunrise wasn't perfect but it was close enough to count The vibrations were impatient he said he's sick of running out But first we set the prices and then we talk about amounts [Feelers] Three things here: - The sunrise recalls the "Cheyenne sunrise" that Mary appreciates when she's not living at "home" [CSunrise] (h/t muzzleofbees : link).
- Shepard is impatient and gives off a dangerous vibe, saying he's sick of the drugrunning business; compare "Shepard started spinning out/ The cowboy trying to dismount" [Feelers] and the violent, hair-trigger descriptions of him on Teeth Dreams [SShoes, LA, IHTWTDFY].
- Shepard teaches the Narrator the basics of the gang's business; the Narrator is really being inducted as a runner in the gang ("I almost rolled my eyes when they asked me how to score/ But sometimes it feels sweet to be the teacher" [FFarm], see comment on "teachers" below; compare also the Panama Jack painter's cap identifying him as a dealer).[*3]
***The last thing Shepard does before the interview ends (and before the Narrator is initiated) is to impart to the kids his wisdom about the future. [*4] This is already hinted at in IHTWTDFY: I guess Shepard came out of St. Cloud with a little ideology Some new way of thinking, man A view to the future [IHTWTDFY] But now we learn what he actually tells them, namely, that The Future Is Now, and that they need to embrace it and not entertain naive ideas about things changing: Did you think about the thing The Maestro mentioned? How tomorrow's pretty much today And I don't predict a major change Seems like you and me have got momentum [Feelers] The title "Maestro" means 'music teacher' ( oetymdict, ahdict), and is related not just to the various descriptions of Shepard as a player/singer of music [*5], but to the description of the gangsters as "teachers" [KatKH]. In other words, Shepard's "ideology" is being framed as a direct contrast to the teaching of the *other* Maestro of the THS universe: Raise a toast to Saint Joe Strummer I think he might have been our only decent teacher [CSummer] Unlike Shepard, who tells the kids to stop expecting anything to change for the better, Saint Joe's message is that we are our own saviors; when the THS Narrator says, "I swear I saw him right by 7A" [Spectres], he's talking about the Strummer mural at the corner of 7th St and Avenue A ( link; clicksandhisses), [*6] on which Joe is quoted: The Future Is Unwritten. [*7]
[*1] The Summer House "mansion up the mountain" [Feelers] is also referred to in the "house in the mountains" from A Snake In The Shower, which the Here Goes thread previously connected to the THS version of the Mission Party ( heregoes): While we've been in between places we’ve mostly been staying At some house in the mountains her friend isn't using. She said he used to be a pretty huge producer. He doesn't seem that huge anymore [ASitS] From the point of view of both the LP and THS stories, the kids are in between places right now (compare Craig's description of them as "kind of displaced, wandering the desert, so to speak": link). The house isn't used by "her friend" Dwight/Charlemagne, who in reality is only a small-timer; this is the big leagues of drug dealing. This is Shepard's house. [*2] The wider context of these lines establishes a thick web of links to the Summer House: And some creep with a camera who says he's gonna make her a star. You gotta wait in the car. Once upon a time I had a meeting with a man in a mansion. He pulled a few strings just to demonstrate how it's all connected. Disseminating from a central source Hemingway on the Ketchum porch [Star18] Here we find ourselves in the place out West where our heroine's gone with the Kid from California to become a "star" (see THE QUEUE above), the place where she's working running orders from the "porch" to the cars ("you gotta wait in the car" [Star18]; see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL and OSSEO above). In the middle of all this is Shepard, the guy who controls the dissemination of speed from St. Cloud into the Twin Cities (see NICE NICE above). He's the man in the mansion. [*3] Not only was the Narrator inducted into the gang as a runner, there's evidence that he made a certain amount of money at the job, and in very short order. Gideon, the THS reflection of the LP Narrator with respect to this experience (see CARGO VAN above), finds himself having rapidly made about $16K after he gets jumped in: Went down with like fourteen bucks and woke up with like sixteen grand [BBlues] The narrator of the solo song Magic Marker, whose experiences are looking more familiar the more we learn about the LP story (see SHOT IN THE SHOULDER above), also makes a quick $16K after meeting "a man" (compare "meeting with a man in a mansion" [Star18]): Spent the best part of the summer Tryin' to come up with a plan Made a couple little changes And I met up with a man Did somethin' kinda strange But I made like sixteen grand [MMarker] The solo song Eventually I Made It To Sioux City records yet another take on the same story, again following a meeting with "a man" of supremely evil character: Last summer I met a man so evil Don't even want to think about his face I made a good amount of money In a little bit of time [EIMItSiouxCity] [*4] Shepard has a pretty high opinion of the sound of his own wisdom: How a new billionaire in an Underdog shirt Built a statue to honor his ways and his words [TPProcedure] The comparison of Shepard to St. Francis turns on the analogy between this sermon and the saint's legendary preaching to the birds ( wikipedia; for the kids as birds, see EAST VS MIDWEST above): St. Francis with the pigeons on his shoulder [Feelers] [*5] Shepard isn't looking for a blowjob as such; this is purely a demonstration of power. I bring this up both with respect to the "power, wealth, and mental health" theme of ODP ( link) and specifically with respect to the exploration of "powerless[ness]" in Heavy Covenant, which includes the following passage: First I watched him play his instrument A resonator with a missing string Then I asked him about the songs he did How he decides what songs he's gonna sing [HCovenant] The recurrence of the "string" metaphor in the context of a respectful one-on-one dialogue indicates that the music master (Maestro) here is Shepard; this surmise is confirmed by Me And Magdalena, where the "sing[er]" is also identified as a "psychopath" (see discussion of Shepard's violent instability, especially in Saddle Shoes and Look Alive, above) and one of the "rich guys" (see Craig's comments pointing to Shepard as the proprietor of the Summer House: link) for whom entering heaven is as difficult as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle ( Mark 10:25): But I still admit that psychopath can sing. Distances are difficult. Precious is the time. When he cancelled all those concerts there were rumors that he died. Someone made a joke about the camel in his eyes. I guess the needle was implied [M&M] The "singer" metaphor appears, then, to be directly related to the Maestro dealer playing his "strings" (and to the idea of the Wednesday night parties as "concerts" [MaM]; for "shows"=parties, see THE TUNES above), with the suggestion that the stringed "instrument" is Juanita herself: she's a "resonator" because of her habit of noisemaking during sex (see STEREO SOUND above), "with a missing string" in the sense that right now "She could shake but couldn't really sing" [Esther] (compare "she's that sweet missing songbird" [LID]). Hanover Camera confirms that the "singer" is the recipient of blowjobs from the addicted kids: The singer put his finger in my mouth We were up the against the miracle, maxed out every night Our knees were shot from way too many prayers [HCamera] For another context in which the act of compelling an addicted kid to perform sexual service is framed as singing a "song," see Roman Guitars: The only songs this singer sings Are songs about his victim things And no one ever loved him like you did And then he points at every kid ... And no one ever loved him like you do And now he's pointing right at you [Roman Guitars] This reading of "song" suggests that Shepard's "demonstrat[ion]" [Star18] is the moment at which the Narrator and Juanita's renewed Mission Party connection comes to an end: Then she heard a song she liked and lost me [Esther] It also lends a very dark construction to the second and third verses of Entitlement Crew: Now here's the church, here's the steeple I like the party favors but I hate the party people. Got distracted by the chorus where the kids all sang along. Move to the rogue set. I always really liked that song. You like that song too. I know that you do. I saw you mouthing all the words When you didn't know I was watching you [EC] More on the portrait of Shepard as a "musician" shortly (see RASTAFARI GUY below). [*6] Note that the Strummer mural and 7A are located in Tompkins Square, birthplace of the American crust punk scene ( link). [*7] As observed in the discussion of "open door policy" above, Craig's album titles (see DOUBLE TAKES below) are heavy with multilayered meaning; it's the contest between these two teachers' precepts that gives us Faith In The Future.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 25, 2021 7:44:28 GMT -5
I'm wondering if gun shots are ever fired in this part of the story, or maybe later on? The heavy emphasis on "guards with heavy arms" (Family Farm), the gun on the bed, along with the dogs (Eureka) and this Rock For Lite Brite scene, made me think it's plausible. And even before reading this, actually while making dinner yesterday, I heard Unpleasant Breakfast in a new light. It has this pretty well developed maritime theme, which I know hear as a deliberate way to place (at leaste some of) the events in it at the coast/shoreline, which we know believe is 169. If so, the line "...all the shells made me think of you"could be about gun shells rather than sea shells, which is the natural way to hear it, in a normal context. Gunshots are fired twice in the LP story. Once is the time when the Narrator's driving around the townie trap houses trying to find Juanita, and gets shot at after making inquiries at the wrong one (the drive is described in DEPARTMENT STORES and CALENDAR: SECOND PASS; a note about "i'm getting shot at" in this context is in LOOKING FOR K above). So you're right about this, only it's the guards with heavy arms at some *other* gang's trap house, and not the "Family Farm" (the Summer House) where Juanita is. Your idea about "all the shells made me think of you" is a great reading of "shell," I hadn't even thought of that; the second time a shot is fired is in fact the one documented in TCMamG: jenny's pretty jumpy, pulls a gun out of the glove compartment and she shoots it off to try to impress you [TCMamG] Say hello to Walter! We'll get there in just a few weeks ...
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 25, 2021 6:29:11 GMT -5
ESTHERThe other important account of the Mission Party is found in the song Esther. There are five verses worth looking at in context; it'll be clearest just to set out the whole text and then talk about the details of interest after. In the middle of a mission I met Esther in the kitchen Drinking something blue. It looked like Windex. She could shake but couldn't really sing. Sharpened like a feral thing. Helped me with my part when I lost interest. She said her name was Esther. I said baby that sounds biblical. Ain't she the one that came up after Vashti? Yeah and then some other stuff. At some point there I fell in love. Then she heard a song she liked and lost me. ... When we're this deep in the valley You can see so many stars. When Esther told her story We were sitting in her car. She said her folks were never close. They had me because they had to. No one named me Esther That came up a little later. It was after some detective Came around here with some questions. I went out to Colorado. I was mostly in the motels. Started living pretty reckless. Started calling myself Esther. I just felt like someone different. ... She's never going home. Her folks were never close. We mostly watch the tv. Crack the windows when we smoke. Her aura is amazing But her room is kind of bleak. I met Esther at a party Been together for a week [Esther] Rather than talk about reflection or shadowing, we should just point out the obvious ("detective"!) and say that this is, to all appearances, the Narrator talking about Juanita during the period of The Summer House and after: [*1]- "In the middle of a mission I met Esther in the kitchen": the "mission" is the LP Narrator's quest to spring Juanita from her captivity among the gangsters (it fits the story of the THS kids rejoining the Skins too, though not as simply); "in the kitchen" means that she's back on the Scene, in the warehouse where the Wednesday night Mission Party is being held (see LOOKING FOR K and CARGO VAN above).
- "Drinking something blue. It looked like Windex": ingesting a roofied drink (compare Mary's green margaritas and Juanita's purple drinks; see LACED SUBSTANCES and ROOFIES above), in this case apparently Ketamine (see LOOKING FOR K above).
- "She could shake but couldn't really sing. Sharpened like a feral thing": this is late in the summer, late in the story, and Juanita is both "weird-talkin" [MPADJs] (see LOOKING FOR K above) and looking like "corpses/ warped and all distorted" [LQ] (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above), thanks to the "sharps"=needles/gangsters (see BREWERY BAR: THE VESTIBULE above).
- "Helped me with my part when I lost interest": there's nothing pleasant about being the new kid in the gang, but the Narrator sticks it out in order to stay close to Juanita. (In the THS version of the Mission Party, the "new kid" [BCrosses, MPADJs] is, expressly, a part played by the Narrator; see ORIGINS OF IMAGES above.)
- "She said her name was Esther. I said baby that sounds biblical./ Ain't she the one that came up after Vashti?": Ketamine is an ester; "Esther" is the drug fiend personality that "came up after Vashti," just as "K"=Ketamine is the drug fiend personality that came up after Juanita (see LOOKING FOR K and LACED SUBSTANCES above).
- "At some point there I fell in love": the THS account of the Mission Party describes the THS Narrator "fall[ing] in love" [MPADJs] with Mary at the end (see LOOKING FOR K above).
- "When we're this deep in the valley/ You can see so many stars": the "valley" is the valley of US-169 where the Summer House is located (see THE WEST above); when Juanita's there, she's gazing at the "shootin stars" [MV, SBackwards] of the drugs in her system (see DRUG SLANG above). Compare Summer House's "at night ... you can see the whole galaxy" [SH].
- "No one named me Esther/ That came up a little later": see above about Esther/Katrina.
- "It was after some detective/ Came around here with some questions": we are in the period after the detective's visit to the Summer House; "here" is the Summer House (see DETECTIVE above).
- "I went out to Colorado./ I was mostly in the motels": Colorado and the motels are hallmarks of Holly's disappearance with Gideon [MM, SN], which, like her disappearance with the Kid from California, is ultimately based on Juanita's disappearance with the gangster at the end of The LBI. Colorado is located in the West (see THE WEST above), and the motels are a prominent feature of both the LP [Langelos] and THS [GoaH, SShoes] versions of the chapter now beginning (see TWO WEEKS and ROUGH RIDERS below).
- "She's never going home": this is the same assertion made by Juanita in her Summer House phone call with the Narrator: "what do you mean you ain't never comin back to the city ... when you get home monday, then you'll barely know me" [SH].
- "Her aura is amazing/ But her room is kind of bleak": again, this refers to Juanita in the Summer House, where she has her own room: "and she's proud of her sound-proof bedroom/ it gets so loud, there's like thirty threesomes" [SCity] (see DETECTIVE above, and CANDY'S ROOM below).
- "I met Esther at a party": the LP Narrator met Katrina, i.e. was reunited with Juanita, at the Mission Party.
- "Been together for a week": Their time in the gang together isn't going to last indefinitely, but it lasts longer than a week (see TWO WEEKS below).
Most of the song is such a straightforward account of this stage of the Lifter Puller story, that the one deviation from it is thrown into high relief: namely, the fact that "Esther told her story" when they "were sitting in her car" [Esther]. Even in the THS version of the Mission Party, Mary's car doesn't enter the picture (the kids get a ride to the party from a dealer [RP], see CARGO VAN above); this little scene looks like it's just been tacked on to the rest of the narrative, almost without regard for consistency. What's going on here? In all the telling of the THS story prior to the release of Thrashing Thru The Passion, there was no description of an episode in which the THS Narrator and Mary recapitulated the intimate Jeep Encounter conversation between the LP Narrator and Juanita. [*2] In other words, for fifteen years, Craig had this fundamental material in perpetual reserve, ready to be reused if it could ever be worked in; and this is where he chose to work it in, buttoned onto the parking lot scene of the Mission Party, in an ideal world before the sharks show up (see JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN above, along with further discussion of this choice in THS CHARACTERS below). [*3] [*1] Separately, the fourth verse of the song looks back on Party Zero and the Return Parties: The times that we were powerless were times that I remember best. When it first came on it felt just like a blanket. Once we had a little bit we pretty much just wasted it. Traded in our tickets for drinks and little trinkets. That scene back in the city was the opposite of freedom. We were always so damn broke. It was this whole dependent fallacy. They started shooting. I sort of saw into the future. And Esther always wants it how it used to be [Esther] - "powerless": addicted and desperate for a hit (see TWO TWENTIES above).
- "When it first came on it felt just like a blanket": compare "first it feels like a prick and then it hits you like a jumbo jet" (see SHOT IN THE SHOULDER above).
- "Once we had a little bit we pretty much just wasted it": a little bit, or half a breakdown, of meth (see A LITTLE BIT and TWO TWENTIES above).
- "That scene back in the city": The Scene; The City (see THE CITY above).
- "the opposite of freedom": compare "we thought that we were so free but it was a chemical reaction/ we thought we were experienced but we were mostly crashing" (see THE CRASH above).
[*2] Craig couldn't possibly have attached a THS version of the Jeep Encounter to the end of Holly's birthday/costume party (the THS version of The LBI): Mary spends that evening cold-bloodedly foisting Holly onto Gideon in order to get closer to Charlemagne; a segue into intimacy with the THS Narrator would be out of the question. [*3] "Crack the windows when we smoke" is evidence of the underlying Jeep Encounter setting: compare "she smoked and I made some progress" [Sublet] and "there's smoke in the seats" [Indications] (see JUST STARTED TALKING and REAR VIEW MIRROR above).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 24, 2021 6:40:30 GMT -5
CARGO VANSo the Narrator finds Juanita in the back of the party, mired in a K-Hole, but alive. We know that the Wednesday night parties move around from place to place, and that it takes a car to get there (see NICE NICE, THE RIDE and FRONTAGE ROAD above). The Rock Problems account of the THS version of the Mission Party makes this point explicitly: The girls want to go to the party, but no one's in any shape to drive So we called up your guy, and when he comes we're gonna ask for a ride [RP] We can be sure, then, that the Narrator goes to the party in a car, that is, in his Jeep. It can be presumed, too, that an event that's meant to draw customers from the public (unlike the weekenders in the brewery bar) will have a place to park in the immediate vicinity. So once he's found Juanita, all that's left for the Narrator to do is to take her by the hand like he did at The LBI, lead her out to the car, and go. In her dissociated state (this being the point of Ketamine's use as a date-rape drug, see LACED SUBSTANCES above), she follows him out of the party without resisting. They get to the parking lot where the Jeep is. And then they run into a problem. ***Rock For Lite Brite takes it from there: now here's the situation the streets got hot and you got caught there's dogs out in the parking lot just weren't ready when the shit got heavy there's sharks out in the parking lot then it all became like an action/adventure looking in the mirror, reaching for your holster bang bang now you're shooting like a soldier [RfLB] The Narrator got outside with Juanita, only to find that the parking lot is now guarded by the gangsters ("sharks"; see SHARKS & JETS above) with their dogs. We know that the dogs belong to the Summer House (see LOOKING FOR K above); these are Juanita's keepers. The Narrator's got himself caught. [*1]He wasn't ready for this --- and now the shit gets seriously heavy; with the failure of his rescue mission, [*2] he's drafted to become a "soldier" in the gang (for "shooting" during the THS Narrator's time in the gang following the THS version of the Mission Party, see both "took a couple shots" [SShoes] and "pinpricks" [AfHA]). [*3]Note that MPADJs uses the same term "get heavy" ("It's gonna have to get a little bit heavy" [MPADJs]) to describe the chaos that begins with the THS version of the Mission Party (see LOOKING FOR K above), confirming that these RfLB lines are indeed about the events of the LP original of that party. ***The Narrator's induction into the gang won't be formally decided on until a little later (see SHEPARD'S MANSION below), but it begins now, when the gangsters detain and take him away with them. This is a plausible reaction on their part: they've caught him attempting to make off with Juanita, their "queen" (see COSTUME PARTY above) and de facto possession; rather than let him leave and try again with the help of the authorities, and knowing him as well as they know Juanita, they choose instead to keep him close, under their influence and supervision. This induction is, for the rest, the LP original of Gideon getting "jumped in" to the Skins. The description of Gideon's experiences in Barfruit Blues and Hostile Mass lets us fill in details of that experience that are missing in the LP source: - the gangsters drive the Narrator and Juanita back to the Summer House in a "cargo van" [BBlues], one of the vehicles in which they came; [*4]
- when they get back to the Summer House and formally jump him in, they haze the Narrator, shave his head, and rape him.[*5]
The Ambassador supplies the detail that they not only shaved his head, but burned the hair after shaving it; this is consistent with the smell of burning hair being the THS Narrator's first impression ("at first" [Ambassador]) of the place where the alpha girl is staying: While you were still staying there. All the halls smelled like burning hair. In the end it made you sick but at first you didn't mind [Ambassador] On close inspection, the THS implication that the hair comes from the Skins themselves doesn't hold up, because shaving your head only produces enough hair to burn the first time you do it; in other words, the burning can only have taken place during an initiation. This is consistent with what we observed upthread: Gideon (and in deliberate imitation of him, Charlemagne) is the only shaved head in the THS story, reflecting the precedent of the LP Narrator, who is the only shaved head in the LP story; the gangsters are heshers, not skinheads (see HESHERS above). The other inference we can make from the Gideon parallel is that the LP Narrator wears a Panama Jack painter's cap (with the flaps unbuttoned [SdS alternate lyrics] to keep the sun off his newly-unprotected neck [HM]). This, too, is consistent with the fact that the Summer House gangsters wear Copenhagen painter's caps; the Narrator gets a cap in the same style, but with a "jack"=dealer [DStraps] version of the "Copenhagen" advertisement of drugs concealed in the hatband (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above). [*1] "The streets got hot and you got caught" [RfLB] is one of Craig's "aggressive ambiguities" (see CONVENTIONS above); the rest of the song describes two events, and this line refers to *both* of them. "Hot streets"/"the streets are hot" is slang for a situation in which a criminal act has put the authorities in a state of high alert, making the area "dangerous, thus unsafe for criminal activity" (for an example along with the definition, see "hot," entry 5a, in Green's Dictionary of Slang: gdict). The first of the two events referred to, beginning with "there's dogs out in the parking lot," is the one we're reviewing now: in trying to steal Juanita, the Narrator puts the gang on alert, and is caught by their guards out in the parking lot. The second event, beginning with "your girlfriend's dead," happens a little later; we'll come to it shortly (see BLOODY CAR WRECKS below). [*2] The Narrator's mission to rescue the girl from the house where she's held captive is the point of the reference to the movie Taxi Driver ( youtube; youtube): then it all became like an action/adventure looking in the mirror, reaching for your holster [RfLB] [*3] The term "soldier" is regularly used of gangsters, from the description of the Skins in Cheyenne Sunrise and Look Alive: 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 [CSunrise] They hang up at the Methodist So hard to be a Christian soldier there [LA] to the dealers of the Nice Nice in Jeep Beep Suite: entertaining the soldiers, makin eyes at the sailors [JBS] to the trap-house inhabitants of La Quereria: and the words came from the porches and the kids stood just like soldiers and every murdered raver was just dying at the hands dealt by the dealers [LQ] [*4] The "cargo van" of BBlues is referred to again in the "camper van" of Lanyards: She took me home to her place in a camper van behind some old warehouse Said she couldn't come down and crash until we listened to 'Wipe Out' [Lanyards] There's a lot of misdirection here: - the emphasis on "camper" makes it sound like "in a van" goes with "her place"; but in fact, it goes with "took me." It's a "van behind some old warehouse" in the sense that it's parked behind the old warehouse where the Mission Party is being held.
- the alpha girl's not driving, but the fact that she's the one who wouldn't "come down and crash" at The LBI, instead heading off to the "surf" of the West Coast ("Wipe Out"; see THE FOAM above) and drawing the Narrator after her, makes her the agent.
[*5] We've looked at the gangrape implications of Gideon getting jumped in upthread (see THS REVISITED above); his no-shoes-no-pants-Porky-Pig experience [HM] (compare the "squeal like a pig" rape scene from Deliverance: youtube) is a reflection of what happens to the LP Narrator during his induction after getting caught at the Mission Party. Interestingly, the MPADJs account of the Mission Party contains another reflected detail bearing on this same LP origin. The description of Charlemagne getting raped by the gangsters (see STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above): They're jamming jetskis into the jetty now With some guy who looks like Rocco Siffredi And I've heard he's been dead once already [MPADJs] confirms that the Mission Party gangrape is the second of *two* such episodes, where the first ("dead once already"; see HALF DEAD above) is the Party Zero episode that's reflected in the THS metal bar party.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 23, 2021 5:57:55 GMT -5
LOOKING FOR KSo the detective finds Juanita, but along with her photo and location gives the Narrator some tough news: not only is she there of her own free will, but the Summer House is under serious guard. If he wants to break her out of there, his best bet is to go and try to bring her back himself: i know that you're scared, but i suggest you go back to the bears [Bears] Out of options that don't involve the police, the Narrator decides that that's what he's going to do. But how's he going to pull it off? ***One thing he *can't* do is drive up to the Summer House and demand that she come with him. It's not just that she's already told him she won't leave, although he's pretty sure that's going to be a problem too: Not sure you even want to be rescued [FFarm] You got to want to be rescued [Riptown] It's that, as the detective will have told him and he himself must have realized, it's too dangerous. We have the evidence of Nassau Coliseum to suggest that the Narrator was shot at during his weekend drive around the drug houses ("i'm getting shot at/ it's getting hectic, there's so much traffic" [NC]; see DEPARTMENT STORES and CALENDAR: SECOND PASS above). This is the response he got to inquiries in the *wrong* places. What will he get if he shows up at the right house and insists on taking her away? We can see now how the dogs fit into the picture; Eureka's description of the drug house to which the Kid From California takes Holly includes not only a guard at the door and a gun within reach, but an attack dog on a rope: There was a guy at the door. There was a gun on the bed. There was a dog on a rope It had a cross on its head [Eureka] This is confirmed by Banging Camp's description of the dogs being "called in" to attack unwelcome visitors: She said if they think you're a Christian then they won't bring in the dogs [BCamp] Family Farm (itself a euphemism for the Summer House, see DETECTIVE above) emphasizes the "so heavily armed" [LGI] security: ... a fortress she called the family farm Out along the towers there were guards with heavy arms [FFarm] Between guns, dogs, and Juanita herself, getting to her while she's at the Summer House is out of the question. ***But there's still one other place where he has an opportunity to reach her, in a venue that's accessible to outsiders by design: [*1] namely, the Wednesday night parties. On the next every-other-Wednesday following the detective's return, the Narrator heads back to the Scene with intent to find and extract Juanita. Mick's Tape states expressly that he's "jettin off" to the Scene in The West to meet her there and "jettison" Katrina, Juanita's "ghost"/"facelift": jettin off to the coast where the girls all taste like toast i'm getting off at the coast where the boys all taste like soap and when i get to pasadena, gonna jettison your ghost i'm getting off at the place where the boys all taste like paste i'm getting off on the place where the girls all get so wasted and when i get to sacramento, gonna jettison your facelift [MTape] As usual, we need a name by which to distinguish this party from the others in the story. Both as a matter of factual description and following the lead of Esther, we're going to call it the Mission Party. ***Going into the Mission Party, the Narrator is every bit as scared as the detective said he was: I didn't even want to go out 'cause I was way too frightened [RP] Giving the gangsters a wide berth, he approaches one of the "chesterfield chicks" [LiaL] (one of the other girls on the Scene; see THE QUEUE and COSTUME PARTY above) to ask her if Juanita is there. There's a misunderstanding: she says this isn't a rave, it's a party and i said i'm sorry, god bless the dj [KatKH] What's elided in this account is the Narrator's opening question, in which he asks for Juanita by her K (Katrina) nickname, leading the girl to think he's looking for Ketamine, as if they were at a rave: Narrator: Hey do you know where I can find K? Girl: This isn't a rave, it's a party! Narrator: I'm sorry! God bless the dj ... Note the girl's insistence on "party," affirming that this is one of the Wednesday night parties. [*2] The Narrator's reflexive "god bless the dj," meaning himself (see THE KISS above), is further evidence of how frightened he is to be returning; we note that the THS Narrator has the same reaction under the same circumstances in You Gotta Dance, in which he asks the listener to "say a prayer for the boys in the band" [YGD] on the occasion of his "going back in" to the Skins. [*3] Thinking that he's looking for Ketamine, the girl points him to the guys with the Copenhagen hats (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above): these guys with their eyes in their visors are a good place to start if you're lookin for k [KatKH] The Narrator, still hoping to avoid the gangsters, doesn't want to accept the irony of the fact that he's got the right answer to his question, even if the girl thought she was answering a different one. He tries again to explain to her who it is that he's asking about. You know, K, Katrina, the girl who was always with Night Club Dwight (the boy with the pipe in ILtL, Manpark, CRoom, NN; see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT above)? our teachers they call her katrina but really when you're speeding towards sunrise, katrina's a bit much to say now we just call her k, and her boyfriend's the bass he's got guts he's got grace, he's the boy with the pipe in his face [KatKH] ***The title of the song, Katrina And The K-Hole, makes a triple allusion, to 1) Katrina And The Waves ("Katrina and the ___"; see KATRINA above). 2) K-hole, slang for "Periods of ketamine-induced confusion; the depressant high associated with ketamine" ( ondcp), or "a state of dissociation with visual and auditory hallucinations" associated with excessively high doses of Ketamine ( wikipedia). 3) A-hole, i.e. Night Club Dwight, Katrina's asshole boyfriend. We can't take for granted that the title of the song is related to its contents; [*4] but the implied "A-hole" link to Night Club Dwight is supported by the last two lines of the song, and it's probable that "K-hole" refers literally to the state in which the Narrator finds Juanita. We already know from Solid Gold Sole that her attendance at the Wednesday night parties is now purely a matter of servicing her drug habit (see CALENDAR: SECOND PASS above): one week ago she wouldn't have missed one wednesday night for all the gold that you're holdin in your hands now these discos make her sad she only goes to check her bag and bring it back into her southside hardwood floor apartment stashed in the battery pack of her boombox [SGS] The clear implication of this is that she does in fact attend the party (traveling with the gangsters) on leave from her drug house residence, [*5] that the Narrator does eventually find her there, and that he finds her in a confused/hallucinating state. ***As implied above, the LP Mission Party has a THS analogue in the party to which the "frightened" [RP] Narrator and the other kids travel in order to rejoin the gang ahead of Charlemagne's crucifixion. (The primary descriptions of this party are in Rock Problems and Most People Are DJs; the rejoining itself is alluded to fragmentarily in You Gotta Dance; the journey to the party is described a second time in Snake In The Shower; additional conversational detail is related in Esther.) The LP and THS versions of the event differ in that Mary travels to the party along with the other THS kids, as opposed to already being there in the company of the gangsters ( heregoes; heregoes). The THS version also provides details of the alpha couple's interaction at points where the LP version falls silent: - Mary is described as "weird-talkin" [MPADJs]
- Mary is described as wanting to go straight to the room in the back [RP]
- The Narrator ends up falling in love and feeling sweet in spite of everything [MPADJs, RP]
- Mary criticizes the Narrator for being unhappy, since he's got exactly what he wanted [RP]
Three of these reports [*6] are a strong fit for the LP Narrator's reunion with Juanita at the Mission Party. We know he doesn't find her when he first enters the party, implying that she's in the back (see ESTHER below). We'd already surmised that she's in no shape to talk coherently. And after searching so hard for so long, he must be happy to find her, in spite of everything else. [*1] A Slight Discomfort suggests that public access to the parties is controlled via managed publicity, while confirming that they are deliberately open to outsiders for reasons of business: I thought you're through with all the bougie guys, don't you wonder about the other side? They only get invited 'cause they think that they might buy [ASD] [*2] Almost more interesting than the line itself ("this isn't a rave, it's a party" [KatKH]) is the shadow it casts over the First Night party of THS (documented in The Swish and Barfruit Blues), suggesting that it, too, was specifically a Wednesday night "bar" party: "This was supposed to be a party" [BBlues] ( heregoes). In general, the fact that Mary partied with townies "when there weren't any parties" [OftC] is consistent with the implication that these were Wednesday night events (there *are*, in general, other parties on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday). [*3] Here too there's an LP shadow hanging over "half are getting sprung and half are going back in" [YGD]; it's true that the THS' kids return to the Skins is a roundabout way of getting Mary sprung, but the more precise reference to Juanita and the Narrator, one of the two "getting sprung" and the other "going back in" to get her, reveal the presence of the LP alpha couple in the background (see NICE NICE above). [*4] There are lots of songs in the LP catalog whose titles refer to details of the story that are entirely unrelated to the ones elaborated in the songs themselves: Star Wars Hips, Mick's Tape, Sangre De Stephanie, Lonely In A Limousine, Back In Blackbeard, etc. [*5] Here "southside hardwood floor apartment" [SGS], like "hall phone" [Mono], deliberately superimposes the physical presentation of one of the Scene's "clubs" (the brewery bar) on top of another (the Summer House); the "hardwood floor" comes from the bar, but the "apartment" as residence comes from the Summer House proper. This mashup handling is part of an extended pattern which we'll look at shortly; see CANDY'S ROOM below. [*6] The fourth of these points is not unrelated, but requires a little more discussion; see POSITIVE JAM below.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 22, 2021 7:12:53 GMT -5
THE SUMMER HOUSE: SUMMARYHere's a summary of the events of The Summer House "chapter." ***- Juanita takes up residence in the house; she works as an order taker, holding the money and transacting sacks from the porch to customers' cars [PERFUME COUNTER GIRL, OSSEO].
- The Narrator retreats in his Jeep back to his parents' house in the suburbs, somewhere near the Walnut Ridge Park tennis court in Edina [TENNIS COURT, STAR 18].
- Days pass with no word from her. The Narrator is bored. He scores drugs from a gangster at the tennis court [EYEPATCH GUY, STAR 18].
- He calls Juanita's home phone number and leaves a message on the answering machine, telling her where to reach him [STAR 18].
- Juanita calls in to check the answering machine, hears the Narrator's message, and calls him back at his parents' home [STAR 18, DEPARTMENT STORES].
- The Narrator refuses to accept her farewell. Deciding that he's going to go find her and bring her back, he tells her that she'll be home on Monday [DEPARTMENT STORES, CALENDAR: SECOND PASS].
- His efforts are foiled by the fact that there's too much territory to cover in too much traffic; the weekend runs out, and he still hasn't found her [DEPARTMENT STORES, CALENDAR: SECOND PASS].
- Grasping at straws, the Narrator has an idea. He goes to the pager store and acquires a pager with a number Juanita doesn't know [STAR 18, DEPARTMENT STORES].
- He leaves another message on her answering machine, this time in the voice of the Eyepatch Guy, with instructions to page him at the new number [STAR 18, DEPARTMENT STORES].
- Juanita, who's bored again and is excited to hear from the Eyepatch Guy, pages him back, leaving the number at which she can now be reached [STAR 18, DEPARTMENT STORES].
- He tells her things, chatting about his own score in the third person just to talk to her; like in the Jeep, she latches on to his conversation, and he gets her talking [EYEPATCH GUY].
- The Narrator hires a detective, explaining the situation and giving him the phone number as a lead for finding Juanita [DETECTIVE].
- The detective finds the drug house. Under cover of darkness he gets up to the windows to scope it out [DETECTIVE].
- With his tiny camera and flash, he takes a photo of Juanita, who happens at that moment to be engaged in a gangbang, as proof that he's located her [DETECTIVE].
- The detective returns to the Narrator and delivers to him both the photograph and the address of the drug house [DETECTIVE].
- He acknowledges that the Narrator's scared, but tells him that if he wants to extract Juanita, he's going to have to go back to the gang to do it [DETECTIVE].
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 21, 2021 8:02:19 GMT -5
CALENDAR: SECOND PASSWe've got a lot of new information affecting the calendar to catch up on here. ***We began our review of the events of this "chapter" by establishing that Juanita, newly moved into the Summer House, is "the new perfume counter girl" of Solid Gold Sole. In our earlier discussion of the Return Parties (see DO THIS ALL OVER above), we'd looked at the opening lines of that song: one week ago she wouldn't have missed one wednesday night for all the gold that you're holdin in your hands now these discos make her sad [SGS] and seen that they presuppose both a "now" at one of the Wednesday night parties, and a "one week ago" just before something happened to make her sad about them. In working through the Jeep Encounter, we observed the emergence of this sadness, when the Eyepatch Guy didn't respond to Juanita's advance and she returned tearfully to the gangsters ("the way your tears reflect the stars" [LE]; see LAZY EYE above). This happened early in the morning of Saturday, September 3, 1994 (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS above). With these details lined up, we are able confidently to date the "now" Wednesday of Solid Gold Sole to September 7, 1994 (the Wednesday for which "one week ago" falls on the other side of September 3, 1994); this, together with the knowledge that the Wednesday night parties are held at regular two-week intervals ("every other Wednesday night" [CRoom]), lets us backfill the rest of the Wednesday night calendar around it (see below). ***Now that we can line up the dates of the Wednesday night parties, a date for the Narrator's attempted drowning of Juanita suggests itself. We have here three facts to work with: - The Narrator's disappointed expectations of sex with Juanita coincide with the Wednesday night parties (see EAST VS MIDWEST above).
- Double Straps ("now you're 24 and the shore's a bore/ everybody's waiting on the very same score") indicates that things are still in the Return Parties holding pattern on the Narrator's birthday, which we've dated to August 22 (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS above).
- The crisis of the attempted drowning and breakup took place shortly before The LBI kicks off on September 2 (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS above).
There's one Wednesday night party between August 22 and September 2, and that's the one on August 24. It is very likely, then, that August 24 is the date of the assault. Apart from squaring with the calendar constraints, this sequence of events stands up to scrutiny: a premise of "birthday sex" two days after turning 24 would plausibly have added an "if not now, when?" edge to the Narrator's Wednesday night expectations; the August 24 date would in turn give him a week to acquire a used Jeep and avoid renewing his apartment lease on September 1. ***As for the dates associated with the episode of The Summer House itself: so far, we can only pinpoint the start date of Sep 3 and the first Wednesday night party of Sep 7 with precision. There are additional dates to be worked out, but, like the Wednesday night parties, they'll have to be backfilled from the perspective of later developments (see CALENDAR: THIRD PASS below). Having said that, we do have constraints to work with, and it will be valuable to set those out now for reference later: 1) At least two weeksThe Summer House episode runs for *at least two weeks* starting from Sep 3. Evidence for this is twofold: - The Narrator's statement "the first week you were gone I got so bored" [SH] implies a second week of her absence that is distinct from the first;
- Sublet confirms that the Narrator received the photograph from the detective "weeks," plural, after the end of The LBI on September 3.
2) MondayThe Narrator's reaction during his first phone call with Juanita, "what do you mean you ain't never coming back to the city" [SH], is evidence that she's told him she won't be coming back. In spite of this, he ends the call by saying "when you get home monday" [SH]. Why does he say this, after what she's just told him? Which Monday does he mean? We can stitch together an explanation from a series of fragmented facts: a) As noted (see STAR 18 above), the Narrator's call in Summer House precedes the Narrator-as-Eyepatch-Guy's call in Mono. When he says "girl i had to call twice" [SBackwards], he means that he had to call a second time because *the first call didn't work* (see DEPARTMENT STORES above). It didn't work in the specific sense that he tried to persuade her to come back or at least tell him where she was, but she refused. His recourse to a second call is evidence that he doesn't accept that refusal. b) The perspective of (a) makes clear that his "when you get home monday" is itself a rejection of her refusal to come home, expressed before the first call is even finished. Dismissing her wish to stay, he's formulated a plan to go and get her, which he expects will end with her being back home on Monday. c) We know what his plan to go and get her is: that's the driving for "miles" [SGS] around the townie trap houses plan, which ends in failure (see DEPARTMENT STORES above). It's this failure that leaves him in the position of "[having] to call twice," i.e., having to place the second call documented in Mono. d) His statement about Monday continues "and when you get home monday, then you'll barely know me/ cause i'll be green and empty" [SH]. We recognize in this the reference to the Eyepatch Guy as a Hulk-like wreaker of vengeance (see CHARLEMAGNE above). His attempt to rescue Juanita by force is analogous to Charlemagne's driving around looking for Mary with apocalyptic visions ("revelation songs" [CF]) in his head and Walter, the gun, in the glove box; again, like Charlemagne's search, the LP Narrator's search fails. e) We've observed that the Narrator's search fails because there are too many "miles" [SGS] to cover (see DEPARTMENT STORES above), and indeed it's evident from what he himself says during the first call that he knows it's going to be a challenge --- that is, he specifies "monday" because he imagines needing the entire weekend to find her. (This focus on the weekend only makes sense if he's busy with a job or classes on weekdays, and in fact there's evidence that this is the case, which we'll come to in a moment; see RASTAFARI GUY below). Very early in this thread (see THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above), we noted that the search for a girl that's described in the middle section of Nassau Coliseum (from "i've got a feeling" through "used to believe em" [NC]) bears an uncanny resemblance to Charlemagne's search for Mary. This resemblance, it turns out, is not coincidence: it is in fact the Narrator's search for Juanita in the Summer House that's being described. An important detail in the NC account that's missing from SGS is the description of the Narrator's increasing tension behind the wheel as time drains away and he still hasn't found her: and i've got a feeling like i'm in the beatles bigger than jesus, i'm getting shot at it's getting hectic, there's so much traffic i might never get it, it's behind the buildings it's guarded by cameras, studied by doctors wrapped up in plastic, it sleeps at the airport skips all its classes, skips like a record [NC] He's under time pressure because he only has a fixed window, what's left of the weekend until Monday, to find her. [*1]3) Earliest-case datesThe reason we can't pinpoint dates yet is because we don't yet know if "at least two weeks" means something a little over two weeks, or if it means something substantially more than two weeks. A useful exercise, while we have the data in front of us here, is to set out the *earliest possible* dates for the events of this period. - The earliest possible date for the first phone call would be Friday, September 9, at the end of "the first week you were gone" [SH] (again, a week for the Narrator means the workweek, organized around a job or classes; see RASTAFARI GUY below).
- If the first phone call is Friday the 9th, that makes "monday" [SH] Monday the 12th, and the Saturday and Sunday of September 10-11 the weekend of driving around looking for Juanita.
- We can't propose specific dates for the rest, but it's certainly reasonable to imagine the second phone call, detective hire, investigation, and detective report taking another week-plus, which gets us to two-and-some weeks total.
So the known dates to this point, along with placeholders for the uncertain ones, are: 1994 ----- FRI APR 01 - Ride in Dwight's car down to brewery SUN APR 03 - Easter Sunday. Party Zero assault WED APR 20 - Wednesday night party --| WED MAY 04 - Wednesday night party | WED MAY 18 - Wednesday night party | WED JUN 01 - Wednesday night party | somewhere(s) WED JUN 15 - Wednesday night party |-- in here, the WED JUN 29 - Wednesday night party | frontage road WED JUL 13 - Wednesday night party | WED JUL 27 - Wednesday night party | WED AUG 10 - Wednesday night party --| MON AUG 22 - Narrator turns 24 WED AUG 24 - Wednesday night party: attempted drowning WED AUG 31 - Narrator leaves apartment, moves into Jeep FRI SEP 02 - Return to brewery, The LBI costume party SAT SEP 03 - Jeep Encounter. Juanita leaves with gang WED SEP 07 - Wednesday night party of Solid Gold Sole ? ? - Summer House Call 1 (Narrator/Juanita) SAT - Driving around looking for Juanita day 1 SUN - Driving around looking for Juanita day 2 MON - Planned day to bring Juanita home (failed) ? ? - Summer House Call 2 (Eyepatch Guy/Juanita) ? ? - Detective brings back photo of Juanita
[*1] The Narrator's time spent stuck in heavy traffic in The West, around the time he received the detective's photo, is again mentioned in Lanyards: The scene stuck in my head of her spread out on her bed Like she's showing off her wingspan I sat in heavy traffic I drowned in the Pacific Then I went back to the heartland [Lanyards]
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 21, 2021 7:27:02 GMT -5
I keep dropping my jaw over the density of Star 18, and this thing about a possible real summer house somewhere out of town, is very exciting! Star 18 is crazy. Obviously, writing densely-packed lyrics is what Craig does, but in that song he seems to take it to another level. I just need to let all the stuff about the photograph(s) sink in for a while. And try to make sense of why the emphasis on it is so huge on Open Door Policy. I guess there's nods to it earlier in the Hold Steady catalog too, but it seems like it's at the center of attention on a few of these newer songs. Yeah, it's a lot. Tomorrow is the chapter summary, hope that helps to frame things plainly and simply. I'm tempted to answer the question about ODP, but we'll get to it in just a few days. More than any other album so far, it's got a consistent narrative focus (all centered around a particular place with a door, and someone's policy with regard to keeping it open). Almost there.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 18, 2021 8:16:05 GMT -5
DETECTIVEIn 1994, before the internet, it wasn't possible for an ordinary person to simply look up the street address associated with a phone number; only the phone company could provide that information, and in order to get them to provide it, some kind of authorized inquiry was required. The Narrator is obviously unwilling to get the police involved in his search, which would be the most direct way to bring in that authority. But he has no such objection to hiring a licensed private investigator, who, like the police, is authorized to ask the phone company to link an address to the number, and to use it confirm Juanita's whereabouts. So the Narrator hires a detective, and gives him the telephone number as a lead for tracking Juanita down. This hire is recorded in 11th Avenue Freezeout: [*1] What am I supposed to tell our friends? That you walked into a bender I haven't seen you since But I know that you've been Getting loose with the gin and juice The proof is in the photo shoot ... Made amends with your dealer friends The truth is in the camera lens So don't come home With a stick in your nose I hired a detective He's got a tiny camera [11AF] Note the context in the 11th Avenue Freezeout passage, which clearly describes the time of Juanita's Summer House disappearance, after The LBI: - "I haven't seen you since [the] bender" refers to her disappearance after The LBI. (Note that "bender," like "cuz" in DStraps, has one meaning with respect to what comes before and another with respect to what comes after. The foregoing lines about the smashed hand refer "bender" to the first weekender, Party Zero; the following "I haven't seen you since" refers "bender" to the second weekender, The LBI; "what am I supposed to tell our friends?" is ambiguously "how am I supposed to explain your injury?" and "how am I supposed to explain your disappearance?")
- She's "made amends with [her] dealer friends" after having ditched them for the Eyepatch Guy, and having almost left with him, at the end of The LBI.
- His statement "don't come home/ with a stick in your nose" refers to the fact that she's not at home; she's living with the dealers.
***The interesting *new* information in the 11AF lines is not just that the Narrator has "hired a detective" with "a tiny camera," but that the detective brings back "proof" of having found her in the form of a photo. This is the second important photo of the story (for the first, the one taken during Party Zero, see COMMEMORATIVE PLATES above). It shows her "getting loose" with the "gin and juice," i.e. the gangsters (see LACED SUBSTANCES above); the combination of "getting loose" and "made amends" with "friends," plural, is suggestive of her being caught by the camera in the middle of a crowded sex act, a suggestion which Juanita herself confirms in Bloomington: i'm condescending, i've got my reasons you never gave me back that photograph if it's offending, get used to it darlin well i wasn't even lookin but i saw the flash [Bloomington] She's "condescending" in the literal sense of "going down" (compare BiB, and see THE QUEUE above); she speculates that the photograph is "offending" to him; she "wasn't even lookin" because she was blowing one of the gangsters when it was taken. ***There's a thinly-disguised reprise of this same moment in the solo song Blankets: The detective was expensive But he thought it was something he could solve Found her serving breakfast In a cafe in the Skyway in St. Paul [Blankets] That is, she was giving "service" when the detective found her; "breakfast ... in the Skyway in St. Paul" suggests a scene in analogy to dawn in the brewery bar (see DAWN above; compare "morning whores yourself to the night before" [Langelos], etc.), in keeping with the THS relocation of the place the alpha girl is "living" to the Ambassador (see NICE NICE, THE WEST and DEPARTMENT STORES above). ***We've already identified the events of Eureka as a THS reflection of Juanita's residence in the Summer House (see THE WEST above), and there too we're treated to a description of photos, video, and crowded sex acts: When they got to Eureka they crashed with his friends. They had five in one room. They had four in one bed. ... There was this whole long scene with some mountains and some lakes. And most of it was real but some of it seemed fake. Try not to judge me by the pictures that I take. I've always had some pretty shaky hands [Eureka] ***Secret Santa Cruz also describes Juanita in a group fuck at the end of the summer during which she "interned at some law firm" [SSC], i.e. the Summer House ("interned"='confined', as when under "house arrest" [LQ]: ahdict): twenty-seven lovers in the back half of the summer i know you think it's way too many [SSC] ***Sherman City connects the dots between the fact that she's living in the Summer House, and the fact that there's a "bed" [Eureka] there, to note that she has a "bedroom" where the group sex takes place: and she's proud of her sound-proof bedroom it gets so loud, there's like thirty threesomes [SCity] ***Navy Sheets gives us a little extra detail about the mechanics of this crowd-fuck (we'll return to the furnishings of her bedroom later; see CANDY'S ROOM below): Everybody's coming onto navy sheets [NS] ***Spices gives us a graphic description of the photo, again with the bed, the crowd, [*2] the spread legs, and the drugs that fired it up in the first place ("chips"='cigarettes/joints laced with PCP'; see LISTED above). She sent a picture of a plethora of poker chips Spread out on the bed between a mouth and a leg She said there's pretty many people already, still I wish you were here [Spices] ***Hanover Camera adds more detail about the lighting of the photo (compare "the flash" [Bloomington]) and her physical attidude in the shot; it also notes that it's taken in "her own apartment" (see CANDY'S ROOM below), where she's been "captured" (compare "hostage" [HCamera], "interned" [SSC] and "house arrest" [LQ]): The lighting made her look like she'd been captured Sitting up and staring into space ... The coolest part about her was she had her own apartment It's still an inconvenient place to die [HCamera] ***This is the same photo described in Unpleasant Breakfast: Last summer at the shoreline When you walked into the water Went out up to your waistline And turned back to face the camera Rolled your eyes back in their sockets Then you raised your middle fingers Defiant and undamaged That's when I took the picture [UBreakfast] Again, the details here can be unpacked on the basis of what we already know. The "summer at the shoreline" setting locates the scene in the Summer House, on the "West Coast" of the Twin Cities (see THE WEST above). For "walked into the water," we know "water"=meth (see LISTED above. The photo about to be described is the source also of "Kids out on the west coast are taking off their clothes/ Screwing in the surf" [CSongs], where "surf" is another meth metaphor; see THE FOAM above). Next follows a lot of detail about the captured image. The combination of "out up to your waistline" and "raised your middle fingers" describes Juanita's pose: she's in a gangbang, sitting on one gangster who's doing her vaginally from underneath ("up to your waistline"), and holding a cock in each hand ("raised your middle fingers"). This is consistent with the facts related elsewhere, that she's "sitting up" [HCamera], and that they have "four in one bed" [Eureka]. To this we can add The scene stuck in my head of her spread out on her bed Like she's showing off her wingspan [Lanyards] to conclude that she's oriented toward the camera, with the two gangsters she's holding in her hands on either side of her. Regarding her facial expression, "rolled your eyes back in their sockets" tells us she's high; this is, again, consistent with "staring into space" [HCamera] and "wasn't even lookin" [Bloomington]. The Narrator's "I took the picture" is heavy with meaning; here he's referring not just to the technical fact that the detective is his agent, but to the point, emphasized so strongly in Slapped Actress, that he and Juanita are the authors of their own films: We're the directors, our hands will hold steady ... we make our own movies [SA] Compare again the deeply ambiguous statement in Eureka about "hands" and "pictures that I take," meant in the sense both of *authoring* pictures, and of *being* in them: Try not to judge me by the pictures that I take. I've always had some pretty shaky hands [Eureka] ***As for the detective himself, we know a little bit about his equipment, and about how he got the picture. 11th Avenue Freezeout tells us plainly that He's got a tiny camera [11AF] This camera is called a "Hanover camera" not because it's an actual Hanover camera (h/t muzzleofbees : link), which is not tiny and not something that could practically be used as a portable camera. Rather, it's called that because of the ambiguity between (a) its identification of an actual camera, (b) Hanover, MN on the "West Coast" (see THE WEST above), and probably (c) Hanover, PA, the home of the real-world Sheppard Mansion (h/t star18 : link; wikipedia). [*3]As to how he got the picture: we'll soon learn more about security at the Summer House (see LOOKING FOR K below; it was literally a "fortress" [FFarm]), which would have made it impossible to penetrate, and scary even to approach. The only way we can realistically conceive of him getting a shot of her is through a window, and in fact it seems that that's how he did it: She appeared as a wraith in the drapes Still life with cigarettes, morbid mistakes Trying to suppress a small case of the shakes [R&T] Compare "the shakes" [R&T] with "pictures ... shaky hands" [Eureka] above, and "appeared as a wraith" [R&T] with "look like she's a hostage" [HCamera]; making allowances for the fact that the LP Summer House has been translated into the THS Ambassador in St. Paul (see again THE WEST and DEPARTMENT STORES above), this scene looks very much like the one the detective observed in pointing his camera through the window and past the drapes. To return to the "painting" [TVillage] metaphor for photos (see COMMEMORATIVE PLATES above), this "still life with cigarettes" *is* the photo of Juanita holding a dick in each hand (for "cigarettes"=dicks see THE QUEUE above). In short, the detective got his photo, but getting it will have been genuinely dangerous; the Narrator's report that The hand that held the camera was trying not to tremble [M&M] can be taken at face value, at the same time that it makes a statement of the kids' own authorship (see the notes on "our hands will hold steady" [SA], "I've always had some pretty shaky hands" [Eureka], and "I took the picture" [UBreakfast] above). ***To conclude with the photo: the detective's photograph is the "postcard" of Sublet, [*4] referred to in the same terms 26 years later by the classic postcard text "wish you were here" [Spices]: and i got your postcard, it was from the pantheon it was the first peek at greece that i'd had in weeks [Sublet] That "first peek at greece that i'd had in weeks" [Sublet] is important information; from "the first week you were gone i got so bored" [SH] we'd already suspected (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above) that the Summer House episode lasts at least two weeks, and this confirms: by the time the detective has returned to furnish the Narrator with Juanita's location and photograph, at least two weeks have passed (see CALENDAR: SECOND PASS below). ***What about the "whole long scene" mentioned in Eureka --- a description consistent with filming a video, rather than taking a photograph? We already know that the gangsters have a video camera, which they used to film the Party Zero gangrape (see MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above). According to the description of the photo in Eureka: They had five in one room. They had four in one bed [Eureka] it's implied that Juanita is in the bed with three of the gangsters, while a fourth --- the fifth person in the room --- is standing apart from the bed, filming. This scene is the LP source of what will become Holly's career in porn in THS. We have evidence for this in the "California"/"Hollywood"/"Modesto" [Eureka, C&N, MINTS] setting of this episode in The West; Holly's "videos" [C&N], too, reflect the group sex aspect of the film: She did a movie called North Dallas Foursome [C&N] which tallies with the count of "four in one bed" described in Eureka. ***This leaves us with a final ambiguity to be cleared up. The "whole long scene" mentioned in Eureka is filmed at the Summer House, but "the shoot" described in Riptown is the one from Party Zero: The lens cap was lost so they stretched out the shoot ... The director's distracted, he's losing his light The actors are wrapped up in robes for the night ... But she tries not to date other actors [Riptown] We know that this refers to the Party Zero video shoot for a few reasons. First, "the lens cap was lost" refers to Juanita's theft of "a little bit" (see A LITTLE BIT above): "lens" and "cap" are both slang terms for drugs (LSD, see ondcp). Her theft was the precipitating event that led to the gangrape and filming (see SHORT BY AN OUNCE above). Second, "she tries not to date other actors" identifies the Narrator as her co-star, since he's the only one on the Scene who she won't fuck (see UNDER WATER above. "The actors are wrapped up in robes for the night" identifies this, retroactively, as a porn shoot). We recognize "the director's distracted," then, as another statement of the Narrator's authorship of his own movie, one consistent with "the kids are all distracted" [BBreathing] (compare also J&J; see THE JOKE above), while "he's losing his light" parallels his "window sucking up all the available light" [DH] experience of the Party Zero video shoot (see MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above; for "light"=meth, see LISTED above). The ambiguity to be cleared up, then, turns on the "lens cap" of Riptown versus the "cap/lens" mentioned in Hanover Camera. Riptown describes the Party Zero filming, but the film scenes from Hanover Camera are from the shooting at the Summer House. And the final HCamera statements about Heather and the lens cap are saying something else again: It ends Once she puts her hand over the lens [Hcamera] As recounted in Lord I'm Discouraged, the story ends with the alpha girl reaching for the drugs again (see "lens"=LSD above). It ends When Heather puts the cap back on the lens [HCamera] And this is a particularly heavy line: the story ends when she disclaims her own authorship, and stops making her own movie. ***In short, the detective finds Juanita in the middle of a scary situation; but she's there of her own free will. If the Narrator wants to get her away, the detective tells him, it's going to take a particular act of courage on his part: i know that you're scared, but i suggest you go back to the bears [Bears] [*1] The line "felt like such a big dick" in Slips Backwards' account of Juanita "living on the west coast" refers to this hire also: "dick" is slang for "detective" ( gdict). [*2] "Pretty Many People" is the name of a 2014 album by Three Man Cannon ( discogs); whether this is meant to allude to Juanita's simultaneous engagement with three men's "cannons" in the photo is hard to say for certain, but it's a likely reading. [*3] Hanover, PA is also known as the "Snack Food Capital of the World" ( wikipedia); its homonymity with Hanover, MN and status as the location of the original Sheppard Mansion (compare "Shepard's mansion" [ABlues]; see SHEPARD'S MANSION below) may be the rationale behind the following line from Me And Magdalena: The grackles at the snack bar waging war for popcorn and potato chips [M&M] where "snack food" is metaphor for drugs: "popcorn"='marijuana' ( dea), "potato chips"='crack cut with benzocaine' ( ondcp), "chips"='joints laced with PCP' (see LISTED above), and the "bar" is the Nice Nice. [*4] Putting everything together, there's a gratuitous but still real possibility that the sound of "pantheon" [Sublet] is meant, on top of everything else, to recall the "panther" [Viceburgh, SShoes] gangsters who live there as "house cats" (see RATS & CATS above); compare the similarly constructed pun according to which Katrina's gone to "greece" [Sublet] to get with the "greasers" [BBender] (see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above).
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