|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 17, 2021 7:01:08 GMT -5
DEPARTMENT STORESBack to the sequence of events, following the first message left by the Narrator on Juanita's answering machine. ***The subtext of the phone calls is that the Narrator is still trying to take her away from the Scene and get her back to his world: To tell the truth if I were you I'd rather sleep over than telecommute. 'Cause when you're in the same room I think we make a much better connection [Star18] But the problem now is that he doesn't even know where she is; before he can go and get her back, he has to find her. I was sitting on the kitchen tryna guess where she was living now. ... It would probably be easier if I knew where she was living now [EC] Juanita is receptive enough to the Narrator (when he calls as himself, before he tries again as the Eyepatch Guy) to return his first call; but though she's more bored than ever (see BORED above), she's also desperately addicted to speed, and so terrified of the prospect of leaving the Summer House that she not only tells him she's "never coming back" [SH], but deliberately refuses to tell him where she is. Ascension Blues records the THS reflection of this refusal in Mary's statement to Charlemagne: She said she's sick of all the sucking up She said I'm terrified of coming down ... She said I know you've got a lot of love to give But now you know you can't know where I live I know you're trying to keep it pretty positive And if it makes you feel a little bit better We're gonna all be friends in heaven [ABlues] Like Mary in the phone call of Ascension Blues, Juanita in the phone call of (the song) Summer House knows where she is, but she won't tell the Narrator. If he wants to find her, he's going to have to hunt her down himself. ***His first approach to locating her is simply to get in the Jeep and hit the drug houses out in the townie towns, driving from one to another until he finds the one she's at. Solid Gold Sole's description of Juanita working as the Summer House's "new perfume counter girl" records this search, and his eventual realization that it's futile: department stores go on for miles those retail chicks, they always smile the new perfume counter girl tears apart my world [SGS] The houses and the towns go on for miles --- too many for him to cover them all in his search (whereas our own hunt was limited to a few already-named towns and known proximity to US-169, his is unconstrained). The girls working in these places, who "come right up to your windows" [Trapper Avenue] to take his order, always smile; but none of them are Juanita. He needs to figure out another way to find her. ***The LP Narrator's drive around the towns hunting for Juanita is reflected in Charlemagne's search for Mary late in the THS story: [*1] Wednesday night I saw you riding around with Walter We all know what you were looking for [CF] The LP origin of this episode clears up a genuinely confusing issue with the THS framing. The main THS analogue to Juanita's living at the Summer House is Mary's living at the Ambassador; the Ambassador in turn is clearly identified with the brewery bar (which, having been abandoned by this point in the THS timeline, could plausibly, if improbably, be inhabited). But then why does Charlemagne have to drive around St. Paul to find her, when he knows very well where the bar is? The LP backdrop clarifies that, like "Nice Nice," "Ambassador" is a moveable name, applicable in principle to any of the drug houses around the Twin Cities that play host to the Scene. The reason Jesse (voice of the song Criminal Fingers) is in a position to see Charlemagne driving around in the first place is that she herself is one of the "retail chicks" whom he meets during his fruitless search (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above). ***So Juanita won't tell the Narrator where she is, and he can't find her without more information. He calls to leave a message again, hoping to get further, but now she won't even call him back: the callgirl stalls and lets her voicemail take it she says hey i ain't here besides i quit that business [Viceburgh] So what can he do now? Then he has an idea: betting on the progress he made during the Jeep Encounter, he contacts her again in the person of the Eyepatch Guy, in whom he hopes she's still interested. Again he leaves a message on her answering machine, this time giving her the number at which she can page him *with the phone number at which she in turn can be reached* (see STAR 18 above). [*2] When his pager goes off, he knows he has enough to find her. But now he's going to need some help to run the number back to the source. [*1] Note that, like the LP Narrator, Charlemagne's driving his own car; see FRONTAGE ROAD above. As a drug dealer, Charlemagne keeps a gun, "Walter," in the glovebox. [*2] Note that, while he achieves his goal just by acquiring the phone number, he does also call her back; as Mono, even in its extreme brevity, makes plain, he wants to talk to her, even if he has nothing to say ("but i'll stay up if you wanna talk some more" [Mono]).
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 16, 2021 7:58:21 GMT -5
STAR 18So at the literal level, the Narrator's communications with Juanita while she's away at the Summer House in The West are by phone: [*1] Princess on the payphone with an angle on some western states [CitM] But there's still one more reason why the "mail" framing, with its ambiguous mailbox/voicemail allusions (see MAILBOX above), works as a metaphor: *their phone exchanges aren't direct dials from party to party, but are patched together out of pages, messages and returned calls.* ***Let's come at this starting with the evidence of Bloomington. There, Juanita says of the Eyepatch Guy: his idea of fun is bloomington he always takes his calls at the megamall he left me by the phone at the metrodome [Bloomington] Again, "megamall" and "metrodome" are metaphors for the Nice Nice, for the places where the Scene gets together (see NIGHTCLUBS and THE WEST above); cued by "metro-," for "city," the "metrodome" must specifically refer to The City around the brewery (see THE CITY above). Juanita's saying two things here: - "metrodome": she's saying that the Eyepatch Guy left her wanting to talk to him more, i.e. by phone, down in The City ("metro-"). That's a funny way of framing things, seeing that she was the one who abruptly left him (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above); but the details --- the location of their parting down on the East Side of St. Paul, and the fact that she's eager to keep talking to him on the phone --- are accurate.
- "megamall": she's saying that the Eyepatch Guy "always takes his calls at the megamall" [Bloomington] in the belief that, like her, he's talking to her from a base of operations somewhere among the drug houses of the periphery. We've already noted that her "questin through investin" [Bloomington] image of him as a criminal mastermind is false, the product of a story which the Narrator tells her in order to plausibly account for the Eyepatch Guy's vendetta against Dwight (see EYEPATCH GUY above). Her idea that he "always takes his calls" from her in some drug headquarters is similarly false.
But there's still a grain of straight reporting in her statement that he "takes his calls," and this yields two pieces of clarifying information: - nevertheless, he *chooses* where to take his calls.
It's not the case, in other words, that she calls him on a fixed line, and he picks up when the phone rings. Rather, what it must mean is that 1) he carries a pager (for pagers in the LP world see Viceburgh, LSifL); 2) she pages him, placing the call from a phone at the Summer House (from his end of the line, the Narrator, who's never seen the Summer House and doesn't even know exactly where it's located, imagines her "talkin on the hall phone" [Mono] like the one in the party house that he does know well, i.e. the brewery bar; see BREWERY BAR: THE VESTIBULE above); 3) he calls her back from what she believes to be a criminal den, but is in fact the same tennis-court-neighborhood Edina house from which he speaks to her in his own person in the song Summer House (see TENNIS COURT above). ***But this doesn't account for all the mechanics of their calls. There are still other factors to explain: For one thing, how did Juanita get the Eyepatch Guy's pager number? The Jeep Encounter ended suddenly and angrily; his objective before it ended was only to bring her down and take her away with him, not to make arrangements for later contact. What's more, he hadn't yet assumed the role of the Eyepatch Guy in a premeditated way: at the time, he was just the Narrator in costume, caught up in an unanticipated situation, without any reason to have acquired a pager with a number she wouldn't recognize. In short, not only did he not give her the number during their talk, he didn't even have the pager yet. For another, we have the Narrator's own statement to the effect that *he* was the one to initiate the calls (see THE WEST above): "girl I had to call twice" [SBackwards]. So what's the proper order of events here? ***We know that the Narrator's call in the song Summer House precedes the Narrator-as-Eyepatch-Guy's call in Mono (we know this because he references the news that "your boyfriend finally scored" [Mono], a fact that he himself had communicated to her during the first call). The very first communication of all, then, takes place when *the Narrator calls Juanita at her home phone number and leaves a message.* He doesn't call her at the Summer House; he doesn't have that number. Nor does he call her on a cell phone; this is 1994, no one has cell phones yet. The way leaving messages worked back in 1994 --- compare "her message machine" [Magazines] --- is the following: - you'd call someone at their home phone number;
- their answering machine would pick up;
- you'd leave a message.
- later, they'd call in (it's the specific case of remote-access voicemail that we're interested in: wikipedia);
- their answering machine would pick up;
- they'd punch in a code;
- the answering machine would recognize the code, and would play back their messages over the phone.
So the Narrator, from his suburban Edina house, calls Juanita at her home phone number, and leaves a message on her answering machine, asking her to call him back. ***This first call to Juanita's answering machine is the moment alluded to in Star 18: So hit me back when it's back in style. Star 18 on the rotary dial [Star18] Star codes, or vertical service codes, were again a feature of telephone communications back in the 90's. There was no *18 code ( wikipedia), but there was a *69 code that could be used to call a calling party back; this feature, called "last-call return" ( wikipedia) was the most widely advertised and popular of the vertical service codes, and "hit me back" confirms that this is the feature being alluded to. This is one of the most densely packed pair of lines Craig's ever written; [*2] for clarity, a few notes: - The title of the song combines references to three things: "Star 18" is a reference to Holly turning 18 and going off to "California" to do porn (heregoes; heregoes); "Star 69" is a reference to the last-call return code described above; "Star 80" is a reference to the Mariel Hemingway movie about a girl who goes off to California to be photographed for Playboy and gets killed by the guy she goes with (wikipedia; see THE WEST above). In other words, "18" is a reference to the legal age for appearing in porn; it's not literal with respect either to the movie or to the telephone code.
- The expression "hit me back" adds a deliberate sexual overtone to the "69" of *69; recall that the first sexual encounter of the LP Narrator/Juanita couple as well as of the THS Narrator/Mary couple was a two-stage reciprocal bout of oral sex (see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above); he goes down on her first, and has to wait for her to "hit him back" --- an act for which the actual expression used in You Gotta Dance is "hit it again" ("hit it again on the south side of the gym" [YGD]). The driving force behind the Narrator's persistent attempts to draw her out of the Summer House is still the fact that he's in love and wants to fuck her.
- On rotary phones (which didn't have a star key) the last-call return feature was accessed by dialing 1169, rather than *69; there was no star-anything "on the rotary dial" (wikipedia). "Rotary" here is poetic, an allusion to his hope that their love will come back around "when it's back in style."
In short, the *69 feature is a metaphor; Juanita did not literally use it to call the Narrator back. But she did call him back, and they did have the conversation documented in the song Summer House. ***The mechanics of the Narrator's second call, when he tries to contact Juanita in the person of the Eyepatch Guy, are a little more complicated, but still simple: 1) The Narrator got a pager (at the "pager store" [LSifL]) with a number that Juanita didn't know. 2) He left another message on her answering machine in the person of the Eyepatch Guy, telling her to page him at that number. 3) She paged him back, leaving the phone number at the Summer House. 4) He returned her page at that number, and they had the conversation documented in Mono. But a lot transpires before that second call. We'll work through the intervening events next. [*1] Both the Narrator, and the Narrator posing as the Eyepatch Guy, talk to Juanita at the Summer House by phone; these phone communications seem to be the point of the reference to her as "Stephanie," and to the Velvet Underground song "Stephanie Says" [LPvtEotE]: Stephanie says when answering the phone What country shall I say is calling From across the world [*2] The Hemingway motif in the song, to which these lines are connected through Mariel Hemingway's role in Star 80, is itself one of the most complicated in any of the lyrics. The first of the three "Hemingway" passages reads: Hemingway at Cafe Select. Donna Summer in the discotheque [Star18] The first line is a reference to Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises; the novel's main character, Jake, who is based substantially on Hemingway himself ( wikipedia) and like him frequents the Cafe' Select in Paris (see chapters 4-9: link), has a war wound which makes him unable to have sex ( wikipedia). The opening scene of Chapter 4 describes Jake in the backseat of a taxi en route to Cafe' Select with leading lady Brett, whom he kisses once or twice, while she expresses her anguish over the fact that they can't go further ( link); the parallel to the Jeep Encounter is obvious, and deliberate. The second line is a reference to Juanita's "summer" in the "discotheque" (see NIGHTCLUBS above). How "Hemingway on the Ketchum porch" [Star18] combines the earlier allusions to both Ernest and Mariel Hemingway to reference Juanita's "suicide" on leaving the Jeep to go to the Summer House, and her new role there running drugs from the porch, is detailed upthread (see THE WEST above).
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 15, 2021 5:48:54 GMT -5
MAILBOXWhile she's living in the Summer House, Juanita is described as communicating with the Narrator/Eyepatch Guy in two different ways, by phone and by mail (see EYEPATCH GUY and PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above). These communications are characterized as conversations by mail three times: in Bloomington, in The Pirate And The Penpal, and in Sublet. We know that these postal exchanges are metaphorical, not literal, for the simple reason that the Narrator, like Charlemagne hunting for Mary when she's living at the Ambassador [CF, ABlues], *doesn't yet know where Juanita is* (we will have a lot more to say about this shortly; see DEPARTMENT STORES below). Juanita is in no shape to carry on a written correspondence in any case. But the real obstacle is that a letter requires a physical address, and the Narrator doesn't have hers. A close look at each of these three songs makes it easy to explain how the "mail" metaphor arises out of the literal circumstances of the story. Let's take them one at a time below. ***1) BloomingtonIn Bloomington, Juanita says of the Eyepatch Guy: he just puts his instructions into my mailbox [Bloomington] Every other allusion to their communications in this song refers to the phone ("calls"; "phone"); it's likely, then, that "mailbox" is meant in the literal sense of voicemail. In fact, we have the evidence of Viceburgh: the callgirl stalls and lets her voicemail take it she says hey i ain't here besides i quit that business [Viceburgh] to show that voicemail is a real part of the Lifter Puller communications landscape. (For the rest, the rhyme with "talk" and "shocks" accounts readily for the use of the term "mailbox" in Bloomington.) That these lines in Viceburgh refer to the communications of Juanita and the Narrator while she's at the Summer House is shown by - "i ain't here": this is after Juanita's "gone" [LE, SH, SCity]
- "i quit that business": this is after the Narrator tried to drown Juanita and she quit him (see UNDER WATER above).
***2) The Pirate And The PenpalIn TPatP, the metaphor is presented in much fuller form: i asked the postmaster, he said penpals really can't be going steady ... all the money from the strawberry stand slips through your hands cause you buy too many stamps spend your days just waitin on the mailman when he gets here you should ask him for a dance [TPatP] Here the focus is on the figure of the postmaster/mailman, to whose arrival Juanita looks forward both for the messages he brings, and because, per the old joke about housewives putting out for the mailman, she wants to fuck him ("going steady"/"a dance"; see DANCING and JUST STARTED TALKING above). A literal phone call doesn't work for these purposes; the person of the mailman is what ties it all together, and it's this that accounts for the elaboration of the "mail" metaphor in these lines. The characterization of Juanita and the Eyepatch Guy as "penpals" is a joke on the Narrator's part: their life as a couple, when they were one, didn't amount to more than being pals who went out and sucked dick together ("pen-"=penis; compare "pestilence presented us with a kickass pen and pencil set" [4Dix], and see WALKED IN above). ***3) SubletIn Sublet, the Narrator tells Juanita: and i got your postcard, it was from the pantheon it was the first peek at greece that i'd had in weeks [Sublet] These lines identify the principal reason for the development of the postal metaphor: at a certain point during the period in which they're connected by phone, the Narrator receives a picture of Juanita --- though this happens to be a photograph, not a literal postcard ("that photograph" [Bloomington]). How he comes to acquire it is probably obvious, now that I've connected the dots; but in any event we'll get to that shortly (see DETECTIVE below).
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 14, 2021 5:58:46 GMT -5
OSSEOThe brewery bar in St. Paul is a real place. The Summer House is located with pretty insistent specificity among the towns along US-169; what are the chances that it, too, is not a real place? What are the chances that we can find it? ***Let's try to cut the problem down to size. Seven towns along US-169 are identified as part of the Summer House's "west coast" setting: Osseo, Plymouth, St. Louis Park, Brooklyn Park, Maple Grove, Golden Valley, and Bloomington (see THE WEST above; the very late reference to Hanover suggests that it and Rockford are both secondary to the US-169 group). All seven contribute to the metaphor of The West, but it's not clear that they're all equally likely to situate ground zero. The town we're looking for has to meet two criteria: - it has to have plausible drug-house real estate, i.e. the right kind of house(s) in the right kind of neighborhood(s).
- it has to be capable of anchoring the "west coast" metaphor, i.e. of justifying the US-169-as-coastline framing.
With that in mind, let's try to narrow it down among them. ***Plymouth and Golden Valley are tony, with lots of money; a Google Maps survey of both towns is immediately and very obviously discouraging, if you're looking for a trap house. Neither of these is likely. ***St. Louis Park is pretty damn nice, too. Yes, it gets a little more urban near the border with Minneapolis, maybe enough that there was some grit there back in the 90's; it also has the advantage of being situated at the western end of Lake Street, in symmetry with the brewery bar down at the eastern end. But the "west coast" metaphor is built around US-169 as the coastline, and the highway side of St. Louis Park is all parks and golf courses. It's really hard to see this being what we're looking for. ***Bloomington has neighborhoods with potential, but again, not on the US-169 side. And while it's adjacent to US-169 at its western end, Bloomington in its entirety is more properly south of Minneapolis than west of it; it really doesn't work as the anchor of a metaphorical "west coast" that runs all the way up to Osseo. ***Osseo, Maple Grove, and Brooklyn Park, on the other hand, are indeed properly west of the Twin Cities, are perfectly situated to anchor a coastline that runs down US-169 past Edina and Edina High [HH], and aren't so fancy that the presence of a drug den is improbable. Plus (see the last image in THE WEST above) the function of Rockford and Hanover as secondary representatives of The West points to something at the latitude of these towns. So it seems very likely that we're looking at one of them. But there's a problem with Maple Grove, in that only the southernmost end of it is adjacent to US-169 before it gets boxed out by Osseo, and that southern end is all empty industrial landscape, with only a handful of buildings. In other words, there's no place in Maple Grove near the highway where a trap house could be located. Which leaves Osseo and Brooklyn Park. [*1] Let's start with Osseo. ***Besides the fitting characteristics mentioned above, Osseo is also prominently named in the lyrics, and is one of the two places (together with St. Louis Park) explicitly described as playing host to the THS girls in their drug-seeking. It's also tiny, and sits in its entirety atop an eastward bend in US-169 like a little capstone on the highway "coastline." All very promising for our search. So, what's in Osseo? And here all of a sudden our search becomes absurd, because thanks to Google Maps it's over pretty much the second it begins. Osseo isn't fancy, but it's a nice little town, and you can look over the whole thing in just a couple of minutes to discover that there's literally one house in all of it that fits the bill, 2000 feet straight north from the point where US-169 veers east, at 8532 Jefferson Hwy, Osseo, MN ( link). Here's a picture: Closeup shot of porch: Let's take stock of what we're looking at here. - It's a proper house, with outbuildings; - It has a porch; - It's completely isolated, surrounded by depopulated industrial zonage, suitable for sketchy activity; - Its windows are hidden from the street by trees; - It's located *precisely* on the north-south axis of US-169; - It's on a local highway (and frontage road!) right off the freeway, for the convenience and security of visiting cars; - It's situated on the corner: specifically, the corner where Osseo, Maple Grove, and Brooklyn Park come together, for optimally ambiguous policing; - It's located on the south side [LID]: it is, along with a couple of others, literally the southernmost property in Osseo; - It's got a driveway-yard offering fast access for those who have to "wait in the car" [Star18] while the perfume counter girl holds the money. ***There's another piece of evidence arguing in favor of the identification of this property with the Summer House. We've just noted (see WEST COAST above) that the gangster Crabs of Math Is Money are described as townies, aiming their "supply if you got demand" at the "money in the city" [MiM] from out on the periphery. They're also described as loitering on the corner of Jefferson Ave in St. Paul: this is the story of the kids called the crabs they used to loiter on the corner up on jefferson ave they're always chanting on their mantra, you only get what you grab and there's money in the city, but the money's in handbags ... newspaper said that some crabs stabbed some rich kid but what's a rich kid doin that far up on jefferson [MiM] To be clear, there's only one Jefferson Ave in the vicinity of the Twin Cities, and that's the avenue running east-west in St. Paul, parallel to and south of Selby Ave (of "Selby and Griggs" [YGD] fame). But on close inspection, this identification presents a few problems: - For one thing, just as Lowertown in St. Paul is located down Lake Street with respect to Uptown in Minneapolis, *every single other description* of going off to find trouble in St. Paul is framed as going "down": "down to the taverns" [OwtB], "down to the railroad yard" [LA], "down to Ybor City" [SA], "down in Lowertown" [MoC], "down by Selby and Griggs" [YGD], "went down with some crust punk junk" [BBlues], "bloodshed down below" [GoaH], "down around the waterpark" [TMG], "down in the manpark" [Manpark], "down at the nice nice" [NN], "down by the docks" [LDoL], etc. Always "down" --- except in this MiM line, where it's "up on jefferson ave" and "up on jefferson" [MiM].
- For another, Jefferson Ave in St. Paul is a *really nice* residential street. Maybe, possibly, the intersection with 7th Avenue at its far eastern end might once have been sketchy enough to host some streetcorner drug activity, back in the 90's. But it can't possibly have supported a streetcorner-loitering *gang.* Plus, that intersection is down at the literal bottom of Jefferson Ave, the diametric opposite of *up.*
- Finally, the characterization of the Crabs as based in the towns outside the city is internally at odds with the suggestion of a base down in St. Paul.
All of these problems disappear if we read "up on jefferson" (note that the second time around, there is no "ave") in tandem with "up in Osseo" [YLHF], and take it to refer to Jefferson Hwy in Osseo --- a stretch of highway barely 1000 feet long having nothing on it but a few commercial buildings and the Summer House, with Juanita living under "house arrest" [LQ] inside: Listing in the lobby of a hotel on the highway Not sure you even want to be rescued [FFarm] ***Final confirmation that this is in fact the Summer House will need to wait for the end of the story (see APPREHENSION below). Even so, the circumstantial evidence gathered to this point makes a very strong case that we've found the right location. There's another respect in which this is a testable hypothesis, though I haven't been able to take advantage: namely, that, whereas stockhouse #4 and the brewery bar were demolished in 2011 (see BREWERY BAR: THE HISTORY above), the house at 8532 Jefferson Hwy still exists. It would be pretty interesting, for example, to visit the property and see whether there's a kitchenette on the premises. [*1] Brooklyn Park has a couple of suitable houses up at its northern end, which might make acceptable candidates if we hadn't found exactly what we were looking for in a location that's nearer to Minneapolis, right off US-169, on a highway, on a corner, with a porch, etc.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 11, 2021 11:13:16 GMT -5
And i guess one more afterthought: there's Craigs earlier storytelling style, with openly Charlemagne-Gideon-Holly narrative bits that deliberately do shoot all over the place (Barfruit Blues, Hostile Mass, etc.). And if Craig wanted to pick that up again, I'd be right there for it. But
St. Catherine's was a nightmare You know they took away my headphones
is a long way from
You came into the ER drinking gin from a jam jar And the nurse is making jokes about the ER being like an after bar
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 11, 2021 6:55:22 GMT -5
THE WESTWe've noted (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above) that the Summer House is located somewhere in the "hicks and townies" periphery towns around the Twin Cities. What are the chances we can locate it more narrowly than that? ***There's not a lot to go on here. In the entire THS catalog there's exactly one example of a townie-town that's identified as such, and that's Osseo [YLHF] ( heregoes; heregoes). So Juanita's in a place like Osseo. That doesn't get us very far. Google Maps has served us pretty well up till now, though, so we should probably just pop "Osseo, MN" in there and see what we can learn from that. Pretty far out there, northwest of Minneapolis, and way north of the familiar reference points of Bloomington and Edina. Suppose we zoom in? At this closer level of detail, we notice a second THS landmark in the map of Osseo: US-169, well-known from the final lines of Hornets! Hornets!: Drove the wrong way down 169 Almost died up by Edina High [HH] That's interesting: the line running north-south from "up in Osseo" [YLHF] down to the latitude of "Edina High" [HH] *is* the line "down 169" [HH], explicitly laid out. It's a long shot, but worth asking: is there something along that stretch of highway that could explain the obscure "wrong way" lyric from HH? ***Reading down the list of towns adjacent to 169 from north to south, we get: 01) Maple Grove 02) Osseo 03) Brooklyn Park 04) Plymouth 05) New Hope 06) Golden Valley 07) Minnetonka 08) St. Louis Park 09) Hopkins 10) Edina 11) Eden Prairie 12) Bloomington #1 Maple Grove; #2 Osseo; #3 Brooklyn Park; #4 ... wait a second. I didn't even know there was a Plymouth in Minnesota, let alone one up along 169 near Osseo; but there is one. We still have very little to go on here, just the beginnings of a pattern. But the pattern itself is enough to let us propose with some confidence that - the title of the song Plymouth Rock is an allusion to "rock"=meth (see LISTED above) being distributed out of periphery towns like Plymouth, Minnesota.
- the ambiguous reference to Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts is an allusion to the Pilgrims' landing as a metaphor for Juanita's "new start" and "clean break" (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above; wikipedia).
That's a strong start. Let's keep going. ***We have #2 Osseo and #4 Plymouth connected by both (a) US-169 and (b) insinuations of gangster speed distribution. Are any of the other towns along US-169 candidates for inclusion in the same group? #8 St. Louis Park looks like a winner: St. Louis had enslaved me [HaRRF] In the Here Goes thread ( heregoes) we'd speculated that this line had something to do with Methodist Hospital [AE, LA] in St. Louis Park, where the Narrator and the gangsters got their medicine maxed out [AE, SPayne]. But that doesn't stand up to scrutiny; the point of getting medicine (e.g. methadone) at the hospital clinic is to *treat* drug addiction, not to provoke it. Like Plymouth "rock," Holly being "enslaved" by St. Louis Park points to speed distribution in the area. ***Are there other towns from the list that we've missed? If St. Louis Park is referred to elliptically by "St. Louis," might there be other half-namings that we never noticed because we weren't looking for them? Come to think of it, the TLaDiLBI line: and she lives in the brooklyn heights, she came down on a friday nights [TLaDiLBI] describes Juanita coming down for The LBI in the *past* tense, but it describes her "living" in the brooklyn heights in the *present* tense --- the same present in which the closing lines ("sick and tired of being stranded by the subway trains," etc., see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above) defending her move to the Summer House are framed. It looks then as if #3 Brooklyn Park too is a candidate for the list: there's the shorthand reference to "Brooklyn" on the model of "St. Louis"; she's described as living up (by contrast with "down") in the "Heights," with the Rocky Mountain High drug overtones of "Shaker Heights" [Swish] and "euphoric heights" [GoaH]; most importantly, there's the telltale verb "lives" to describe her presence there. ***That's four towns so far. Are there others? In The Langelos, the Narrator says: i came from the dust bowl and i was looking for an orange grove ... 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 and when we touch you know it seems like we're one big machine picking up speed somewhere in the valley bring it to the city [Langelos] These "boys" who are "picking up speed" to "bring it to the city" look like the gangster Crabs of Math Is Money, who in the same way are bringing their "supply if you got demand" in to try to get a piece of the "money in the city" [MiM]. They also look like the Skins under the direction of Shepard, the "Maestro" [Feelers] running the wholesale trade of drugs through the city: The vibrations were impatient he said he's sick of running out But first we set the prices and then we talk about amounts ... Shepard ... ... Each daybreak there's a new parade From uptown through the old arcades [Feelers] The implication, then, is that the "boys" of The Langelos are gangsters, based outside of the city in the surrounding towns (which in turn accounts for their insistent characterization as "townies"; see HESHERS above). So what exactly does The Langelos say about their location, again? The Narrator starts out "looking for an orange grove" and ends up with the gangsters "picking up speed/ somewhere in the valley." As noted upthread (see GEOGRAPHY: FIRST PASS above), the first verse of the song is cast in images from Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath; "orange grove" is a part of that framing ("a grove of yella oranges" appears in chapter 18 of the novel, p. 281 in the Modern Library edition). Like other allusions to "fruit" in the lyrics, the phrase is clearly used with reference to a trap house: the "orange grove" of The Langelos *is* the "strawberry stand" of TPatP (see FRUIT above). But suppose the primary pretext for this particular metaphor is actually "grove" as shorthand for #1 Maple Grove, like "St. Louis" is shorthand for #8 St. Louis Park? "Valley," for its part, can be read not only as shorthand for #6 Golden Valley, but as a literal reference to the valley of US-169 itself, after which the town is named (referring specifically to the part of the valley between the hill of the present-day Golden Valley Country Club, and Medicine Lake on the far side of the highway: link). Alone, either of these readings might be a stretch, but the fact that they appear together in a song explicitly describing the distribution of drugs around the periphery of the city, in a wider context that includes similar and clearly-established references to Brooklyn Park, St. Louis, Plymouth, and Osseo, makes them compelling. ***Finally, there's #12 Bloomington. In the song of that name, Juanita says of the Eyepatch Guy: his idea of fun is bloomington he always takes his calls at the megamall he left me by the phone at the metrodome [Bloomington] There's a lot more going on here than in the simple references to Plymouth and St. Louis Park above, but there are common themes. We recognize "domes," "stadiums," and "malls" ("megamall," "metrodome") as terms for the places where the Scene gets together and drugs are obtained (see NIGHTCLUBS above). "Malls" are also on that list because that's a literal location where the gangs retail their merchandise, as described in Stevie Nix: They counted money in the motels, they mostly sold it in the malls [SN] Compare also the Brokerdealer song Do Me Nails, which charts a hunt for drugs that goes from mall to mall and ends up in what appears to be a box drawn around 15th and Franklin (see red X on image below): I went from Rosedale to Ridgedale from Ridgedale to Brookdale from Brookdale to Southdale from Southdale I set sail I ended up east of 35W west of Hiawatha south of downtown and up north above the Do Me Nails [DMN] So Bloomington too is referenced in its capacity as a drug outlet, with a gangster angle to the dealing that's made explicit in Southtown Girls ("I got a brown paper bag and black buckle shoes"), whose Southtown Center mall setting is also in Bloomington. ***Another way of exploring the theme of US-169 adjacency is just to drive down the highway on Google Maps and see what appears. In doing this, some of the exit signs leap out pretty graphically; there's Brooklyn, up around Brooklyn Park: There's also Rockford, up around Plymouth: Rockford Road is so named because it leads to Rockford, MN, situated on the Crow River parallel to and west of US-169. The idea of driving around Rockford calls to mind the allusion to The Rockford Files ( wikipedia) in 11th Avenue Freezeout: i get high watching rockford files juanita lives just like jimmy drives screech those tires, yeah and scrape the sides find that little bit left inside [11AF] That's a pretty gratuitous "Rockford" reference, and comes complete with drug associations; nevertheless, I originally planned to leave it out of this discussion on the grounds that, unlike the other towns on the list, Rockford isn't located on US-169 itself. But then ODP came out, prominently showcasing *another* city along the Crow River, west of US-169 at the altitude of Osseo: One might be a coincidence, but two is pretty good grounds for adding both Rockford and Hanover to the list. ***In short, over half of the towns in the US-169 list, and two more a little further west, are presented as gangster beachheads for the distribution of speed into Minneapolis: Osseo, Plymouth, St. Louis Park, Brooklyn Park, Maple Grove, Golden Valley, Bloomington, Rockford, and Hanover. [*1] There's obviously a theme here. How can we characterize it? Look again at the first map above, the one situating Osseo in the broader Twin Cities geography. US-169 runs down the western edge of the map from Osseo past Edina High to Bloomington, on the opposite side of the Twin Cities from the brewery bar and Swede Hollow on the eastern edge. We've already seen the brewery bar referred to metaphorically as The East, i.e., the east coast of the United States (see EAST VS MIDWEST above). What does that make US-169 and environs? The Grapes Of Wrath framing of The Langelos, along with the "hollywood hills," the "sidewalk stars," and the pun on Los Angeles in the title, points us to the answer. US-169 is not only the Valley: US-169 is California; US-169 is the west coast of the United States; US-169 is The West. ***In clear confirmation of this conclusion, we have the evidence of Slips Backwards: then i heard that you were living on the west coast girl i had to call twice, felt like such a big dick [SBackwards] What those two calls are, we know, because there's a specific track dedicated to each of them: the first is the phone call of Summer House; the second is the phone call of Mono (see EYEPATCH GUY above). This is our smoking gun: Juanita's "living" on the "west coast" is the same as Mary's "living" in the Ambassador (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above); the "west coast" is the swath of towns along US-169 where the Summer House is located. [*2]***This is a watershed, bringing clarity to a host of things that before were muddled (here I also have to acknowledge the intuition of muzzleofbees , who asked me years ago now whether Holly's California wasn't really some place in the Twin Cities; it's taken me until now to catch up with that insight, but he was right). In no particular order: - Holly's departure with the "kid from California" [MINTS] is a THS reflection of Juanita's departure from the Kittson Street parking lot; the bit-player anonymity of this "kid" confirms our inference that Juanita left with an anonymous gangster from the trap house, not with Night Club Dwight (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above).
- Like Juanita "moving" [Emperor] to go take up residence in the Summer House, Holly's change of address in THS ("McKenzie Phillips doesn't live here anymore" [CatCT]) is to a townie trap house on the "west coast" of the Twin Cities, rather than to the actual state of California.
- The identification of Holly's destination with "Modesto" [MINTS] isn't just for the sake of the "modest" pun, but also for the contrast of suburban to big-city California as a metaphoric parallel to the literal contrast of Osseo and the other towns to big-city Minneapolis.
- Eureka is now confirmed to be an account of Holly's departure to "California"; the surprising new elements of this version of the story are explained by the fact that it is, in its entirety, a reflection of the story of Juanita: the apparently Jeep-Encounter-like beginning to the song (see JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN above) is really there, and leads directly into a Summer-House-like account of how Holly "crashed with his friends" in the "tenements" of the "coast" [Eureka] (compare Mary "pretty much crashing there" [Ambassador] for "crash" in the exact same sense).[*3]
- The apparent connection between the fact that the "kid from California" disappears on Holly "for days at a time" [MINTS] while she's living in the trap house, and the fact that Mary has "a house on the south side/ Where she stays in for days at a time" [LID], turns out not to be coincidental; it's Juanita staying inside "for days at a time" in the Summer House that's here being reflected in the descriptions of both Holly and Mary.[*4]
- The reference to Ketchum, Idaho in Star 18 is a "west coast" reference in this same sense: "Disseminating from a central source" [Star18] refers to the dissemination of speed from St. Cloud (see NIGHTCLUBS above) through the western townie trap houses; "Hemingway on the Ketchum porch" [Star18] is a fantastic mashup of Mariel Hemingway's character getting killed by the guy who took her to California in Star 80 (wikipedia), Ernest Hemingway committing suicide in Ketchum, and Juanita, who's committed "suicide" (see REAR VIEW MIRROR and BALTIMORE BELTLINE above) in order to go to the Summer House, taking up her new job there "transacting sacks to the yards from the porches" [LQ] (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL above). I say "Juanita" in lieu of trying to disentangle the Holly (18, etc.) parts from the Mary (Mariel, etc.) parts of Star 18; we'll return to this later (see THS CHARACTERS below).
[*1] The Brokerdealer references to the Brookdale mall in Brooklyn Park, the Ridgedale mall in Minnetonka, and the Southdale mall in Edina are all real, too; but they don't seem to me to be described as part of this Juanita-somewhere-in-the-hick-towns framing, so I'm leaving them out of this discussion. [*2] Other references to the alpha girl living on the west coast include "your sister's in Seattle and she's sleeping with the sharps" [EC] (note the West Coast/East Coast symmetry in the pairing of this line with "your brother's in Boston and he's acting like a dick" [EC]). [*3] "Eureka!" (I found it!) is the proverbial cry of the prospector striking gold during the Gold Rush in California and the Yukon ( wikipedia); the LP/THS framing of The West includes the "gold rush" and "Yukon Club" of Sweet Payne; the girls are going west for drugs ("yeah they just can't get enough" [SPayne]). [*4] "There's a house on the south side" [LID] is of course meant to bring to mind the south side of Minneapolis; but it doesn't actually *say* Minneapolis, a point that will be of interest in the hunt for the actual Summer House.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 10, 2021 23:18:08 GMT -5
There aren't many Craig lyrics I dislike more than the opening verse of Family Farm Mind if I ask why? Seems like pretty classic Craig to me I alluded to part of it above, the feeling that the lyrics are wedged in to fit, badly, over the frame of the music, but really that's just part of it. Craig's a master of language. When he's on, he's in total control, and it's amazing to hear; you know, intellectually, that he puts a lot of work into it, but it seems effortless. Crazy good lines that flow so smooth they almost seem lazy, or ones that come out like possessed prophecies. Images that seem to create one rich story that in fact conceal another. Complicated resonances between verses and titles that create amazing, complex themes. With the opening of Family Farm, I'm not feeling that mastery. The short measures (really only two lyrical beats per line) are boxing Craig in, not the other way around. "Sure they let you keep your handset" is just weak; "sure" is glued on there like pure metrical filler. The hospital theme is bizarre, it's all about phones, with nothing else to connect organically to the announced hospital setting. Later on it's mentioned that the girl the Narrator is talking to is willing to trade her medications, but that's all that remains of the medical theme. So where's it all going? It just feels thrown together and left to hang. Edit: I was falling asleep when I wrote this, but should have continued with a counterexample. Take Lanyards, which at #8 obviously isn't my favorite, but is still a very solid song; it does way better on both of the above counts. Like the verses of Family Farm, the choruses of Lanyards are naturally partitioned into short metrical bursts, but in Lanyards Craig just rolls over the bursty contours and makes them work for him. So much easy power there. Also, without ever saying too much, he creates a deeply vivid story of a guy going out to the West Coast and failing to do what he went there to do, but still getting through. A real subtle weave of narrative from start to finish. Family Farm, by contrast, is all over the place. Hope that clarifies.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 10, 2021 6:33:20 GMT -5
PERFUME COUNTER GIRLSo Juanita disappears with one of the gangsters. This ride's different from the ones back from the Return Parties with Dwight: she puts it all into boxes on a big truck its just bad luck, its a tough school and a quaalude and a vacuum means a clean house and a clean break and her knee shakes but no earthquake and her ride home's on the freeway at the exit by the campus, it's gonna bring her back to connecticut [Emperor] The Narrator says "ride home," but then clarifies: it's going to take her "back to connecticut," to a place where (as already noted, see REAR VIEW MIRROR above) she can "connect" for drugs and sex. It's not her *own* home, and it's not the brewery bar, which they can't go back to anyway, but a *new* home: she's takin off tomorrow says she's gonna start all over when she gets there [LE] So where exactly has she gone? ***Initial clues are provided by the song Summer House. We've now arrived at the point in the story at which the phone call described in Summer House takes place --- a point after she's established a relationship with the Eyepatch Guy (see EYEPATCH GUY above), and after she's "gone": the first week you were gone i got so bored [SH] The song informs us that she's staying with the gangsters ("townies"=gangsters; see HESHERS and TENNIS COURT above) in a "summer house" away from the "city": do you really like hanging out with hicks and townies what do you mean you ain't never comin back to the city my parents never got me a summer house we'd just sit here in the same house and we'd sweat it out [SH] We've already observed that "house" has the regular meaning of 'trap house' ("party house" [TLTtSTtM, BSam], "after hours house" [MMarker], "House of Balloons" [Oaks], etc.; see NIGHTCLUBS above); the "summer house" too is one of these. We've also established that "the city" refers to The City, i.e. the brewery with its party scene in downtown St. Paul (see THE CITY above). From this we can surmise that Juanita has taken up residence in a trap house --- but one that isn't the brewery bar in St. Paul, and isn't in the Narrator's tennis-court suburbs, either. It's somewhere out in the "hicks and townies" periphery towns. ***So what's she doing in the trap house besides fucking gangsters and taking drugs? First of all, she's really living there; in leaving The LBI, she says: i'm sick and tired of being stranded by the subway trains i deserve a little fuck-up every once in a while i'm sick of being scared of falling off the side of my bed [TLaDiLBI] Actually living in the trap house means that - she won't be stranded at parties any more (see STRANDED above), because she never has to leave to go home.
- she won't be "waitin on the very same score" [DStraps] any longer, since she can have a little fuck-up as often as she wants one.
- she doesn't need to be scared of falling off the side of her bed any more, either, having access to a constant supply that lets her "skip the sleep" [11AF], and, more to the point, a bed that's just a dirty mattress on the floor [SGS, OwtB, DH, Spectres, YDGK] (see CANDY'S ROOM below).
Second, because she's living in the house, she's got an actual job there [*1], running orders from the porch to the customers in the cars outside: department stores go on for miles those retail chicks, they always smile the new perfume counter girl tears apart my world [SGS] That's Juanita, the new perfume counter girl: - "new," because she's just taken up residence in the Summer House
- selling "perfume," in keeping with the standard LP metaphor of pharmacy goods=drugs (see PHARMACY GOODS above)
- working "retail" at the "counter," because she's the one who's interfacing with the customers (with echoes of "over the counter" [Swish], too).
***The Pirate And The Penpal gives us further information about Juanita's new start. Like Summer House, TPatP is set during this same period, after she's left the Eyepatch Guy behind and is reduced to keeping in touch with him by what's described (in Bloomington, TPatP, etc.) as a combination of telephone and mail (see EYEPATCH GUY and JUST STARTED TALKING above, and MAILBOX below). There, the Narrator says of her: you spent the summer at the strawberry stand there wasn't much that you could do about it ... all the money from the strawberry stand slips through your hands cause you buy too many stamps [TPatP] This confirms that: - she's the retail face of the drug house: "strawberries"=drugs (see FRUIT above); the "strawberry stand"=the 'perfume counter'.
- she's badly addicted: "there wasn't much that you could do about it"="someone powerless" [HCovenant].
- she's in a desperate state otherwise, too: on the one hand, all her "earnings"[*2] go toward "stamps"=drugs (technically, acid on paper: urbandictionary); on the other, all her thoughts are turned to the Eyepatch Guy, waiting for a chance to communicate with him via "stamps"=postage stamps.
***La Quereria expands on her new situation in even more detail: undisclosed sources have reported that the kids look like corpses, warped and all distorted a summer wrecked on X and house arrest transacting sacks to the yards from the porches and wild horses can't carry away california divorces copenhagen hats, and the skintight pinstripe blue jeans and the bright white Nike Air Forces [LQ] The fact that "summer house" is glossed as " summer [wrecked on X and] house [arrest]" already tells us a lot. But more specifically, we note that:
- the scene described takes place at the end of the summer.
[/a][li] the gangsters are present in their "copenhagen" hats advertising drugs (the same painter's caps they were seen wearing in the parking lot when they took Juanita away, see REAR VIEW MIRROR above). [*3][/li][/ul] - Juanita's a wreck, in the "too skinny" [SPositive] stage of speed addiction; she looks like a corpse.
- she's caught in the vicious cycle where the drugs won't wash away the "stains" [CRoom, NN, SK] of the sex used to get the drugs (see THE FOAM above); "wild horses can't carry away california divorces" means exactly the same thing as "liquid soap won't get you completely clean" [JBS] ("horse"=heroin, see LISTED above; "california divorce"='informal relationship that still confers sex privileges': urbandictionary).
- she's stuck wherever she is under the equivalent of "house arrest"; compare "there wasn't much that you could do about it" [TPatP] above.[*4]
- her job as the gangsters' retail face specifically entails "transacting sacks to the yard(s) from the porch[es]" of the trap "house."
***Juanita's experience here is the LP source of two major THS plot elements: it's reflected in both - Mary "pretty much living in/ A 3.2 bars a stretch to call a club/ It was called the Ambassador" [Ambassador].
***Like Party Zero, the Return Parties, and The LBI, we need a name for this chapter of the LP story. We also need a name for the physical trap house (like "brewery bar" for the Rathskeller in east St. Paul) that distinguishes it from the other locations where the Scene's nightclub/dome/stadium/theater etc. materializes. At risk of confusion with the song title, I'm going with capital-T "The Summer House" for the chapter, and "Summer House" for the house itself. It's the best identifier the story provides for both the episode and the physical location, and doesn't overspecify what we know about either one. [*1] Note the strong resonance between the townies' "town" and the "village" of Traditional Village: When you live in a traditional village. We all do our own little part. This is the future. We can make a new start. Click on the icon. Drag to the cart [TV] The consistency of themes is impossible to miss: - "village": compare the "town" of the townies.
- "live": she's "pretty much living there" [Ambassador].
- "We all do our own little part": she's got her job as "the new perfume counter girl" [LQ].
- "new start": this is the same start referenced in "clean break" [Emperor] and "she's going to start all over when she gets there" [LE].
- "click on the icon. drag to the cart": she's the retail arm of the trap house.
[*2] She's not paid in money; what "slips" (see SLIP AND TRIP above) through her hands are the gangster dicks she's blowing. As in other cases we've seen, the various elements of the sex-money-drugs transaction are metaphorically fungible (see CASH MACHINE above). [*3] We've shown how the branding of the "copenhagen hats" [LQ] is here understood as an advertisement of the drugs concealed under the hatband (see REAR VIEW MIRROR, and more generally SHOES AND SOCKS above); the same is true of the gangsters' jeans with the "pin" stripes (advertising injection), and their "bright white" shoes (advertising "white"=amphetamine and "lights"=meth, compare "lights, and i like em pretty bright" [ILtL]; see LISTED above). [*4] We've noted that Juanita declined to leave the Kittson Street parking lot with the Eyepatch Guy because she wouldn't "go to a second location" [Lanyards] (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above) with him; the irony, called out in Riptown, is that she ended up going to a second location with the Kid From California instead. The Summer House, in other words, is the story's second "second location" of which Juanita had reason to "be careful" [Riptown] (see WALKED IN above); this one "stuck to her shoes" [Riptown] in the sense of being de facto impossible to leave. (Compare "Tried to duck out but we still got stuck/ Like a sneaker in the Mississippi mud" [RH].) [*5] An additional detail about Jesse's "waitressing" is found in the ONDCP document. Speaking of her savior Charlemagne, who got her cleaned up, Jesse says: He said, Let this famine end and let the 2-for-1s begin And bless the beasts and the children and the water and the waiters [SM] The weight loss from her meth addiction (compare Juanita looking like a corpse [LQ] above, and "famine" [4Dix, CatCT]) has come to an end; but she's still working for the gangsters, and dealer Charlemagne too is still hanging around them. So he blesses the "beasts"="creeping things"=gangsters, the "children"=kids, the "water"=meth, and the "waiters" like Jesse herself, and (in joking allusion to Jesus and the miracle of the loaves and fishes) promotes the "2-for-1s" ( ondcp): 2-for-1 sale -- A marketing scheme designed to promote and increase crack sales
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 9, 2021 21:08:15 GMT -5
- Heavy Covenant
- Unpleasant Breakfast
- Spices
- The Feelers
- Hanover Camera
- Riptown
- Me & Magdalena
- Lanyards
- Family Farm
- Parade Days
- The Prior Procedure
I had to really think about Spices vs Feelers, which besides being a really well put together song has that narrative thing going that makes it really important to me. But for listening, I have to give Spices the edge ... comes on really strong musically and lyrically, has a surprising amount of variety in it.
Riptown feels a little thrown together, but it's got some real lyrical keepers ("the kids on the corner they ain't here for their health/ they're just trying to uphold the traditions") and an unhinged giddy Blonde On Blonde vibe that I like a lot.
Parade days is a very fine song but it's just not my jam.
Me & Magdalena, Family Farm, and The Prior Procedure all feel to me like the lyrics are kind of wedged in there, with intelligibility winning out over the rhythm and tempo, but at a cost. M&M is the strongest of the three lyrically, and I really wanted to put it higher just because it's such a cool and different sound, but in the end that struggle kind of limits it.
There aren't many Craig lyrics I dislike more than the opening verse of Family Farm, and I don't care for the "one specific way" chorus either, so despite some strong points in "Said faithful has its limits I just want to see his face" and the whole "She said you get what you get when you push too far ahead" verse, it tops out at #9.
The Prior Procedure has some obvious strengths musically but it just never came together for me.
Heavy Covenant is relentless and amazing, and Unpleasant Breakfast is a lot of fucking fun for all the agony in it. Truly great songs, both.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 9, 2021 20:41:02 GMT -5
Nice man! I got into Berman after you posted about Purple Mountains over on the Music board, since then it's become a favorite album, Silver Jews too. A solid performance, it sounds really good!
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 9, 2021 11:07:26 GMT -5
THE LBI: SUMMARYHere's a summary of the events of The LBI. ***[flashback] - In the aftermath of Party Zero, the owners of the brewery discover the damage and debris left by the gangsters and the kids [FIRST BUST].
- They change the locks on the bar, and install infrared motion detectors and bugs on the premises [FIRST BUST].
[flashback] - After Juanita leaves him, and the better to support his drug habit, the Narrator quits his lease, acquires a Jeep and moves into it [THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE].
[present] - Juanita, maintaining now and starting to get bored with the scene, wants to make something special out of it, so she organizes a costume party [COSTUME PARTY].
- Juanita, who's dumped the Narrator after his attempt to drown her, gets a ride to the party with Dwight, as usual [THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE].
- Her costume is a caricature sexy "indian" dress made out of burlap with unhemmed fringes, mesh, feathers, and sequins [COSTUME PARTY, INDIAN FRINGES].
- He parks beneath the 7th Street overpass in the Kittson Street lot, with the gangsters, & from there walks to the brewery through the park [REAR VIEW MIRROR, BALTMORE BELTLINE].
- Tacked up on the woodwork of the bar like a museum exhibit are photos of the Narrator and Juanita being gangbanged at Party Zero [COMMEMORATIVE PLATES].
- One of the photos is a picture of the Narrator blowing Dwight in the corner while Juanita looks on, smiling. The Narrator takes and keeps the photo [COMMEMORATIVE PLATES].
- The party gets into gear with the usual mix of drugs and sex; trying to get high, the Narrator does a lot of meth ("15 beers" [Hardware]) early [COSTUME PARTY, BORED].
- Observing Juanita from a distance, he admires her look in costume. She too is desperately trying to get high ("like 15 beers" [Emperor]) [COSTUME PARTY, BORED].
- Thanks to the costume, which lets him assume a new role, the Narrator, normally the servicer at scene parties, takes a handjob instead [COSTUME PARTY].
- The activity of the partygoers triggers the infrared motion detectors/bugs on the premises; the owners are alerted, and call the cops [FIRST BUST].
- Coming around the back in their kevlar vests and appearing "out of the woodwork," the cops arrive to bust up the party [FIRST BUST].
- Holding steady, the Narrator grabs Juanita from the vestibule and runs for the stairs, trying to get back underground and out of the complex [FIRST BUST, TWO AT A TIME].
- A cop grabs the hood of his sister's raincoat, which he's borrowed for the costume; but it pulls off, and he gets away [COSTUME PARTY].
- They make their way back across the railroad tracks north of the E 7th St overpass to the Kittson Street parking lot, where the cars are parked [BALTIMORE BELTLINE].
- When they reach the Narrator's Jeep, he proposes to take her away, but she won't go to a "second location" with a stranger, even if she likes him [THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE].
- He manages to keep her attention, despite the whispered offers of the gangsters hanging on the hoods of their cars with drugs under their Copenhagen hats [JUST STARTED TALKING, REAR VIEW MIRROR].
- The Narrator wants to respond; but between the sickness of coming down, the handjob, the alcohol, and his exhaustion, he can't get it up [JUST STARTED TALKING, LAZY EYE].
- Juanita, unstable to begin with and now feeling rejected, becomes hysterical; she demands that he give her something to get her high again [REAR VIEW MIRROR].
- Desperate not to lose control of the situation, the Narrator agrees to give her what she wants, but can only produce a bottle of Sudafeds [REAR VIEW MIRROR].
- Juanita is enraged; shoving open the door of the Jeep, she throws up her beer, while the gangsters in the lot all cheer [REAR VIEW MIRROR].
- In the rear-view mirror, the Narrator watches Juanita's "suicide" and Katrina's "resurrection": going down on one of the gangsters, she gets her meth reward [REAR VIEW MIRROR].
- Juanita drives off with the gangster while the Narrator is left behind, lonely in the driver's seat of his would-be limousine [REAR VIEW MIRROR].
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 9, 2021 10:42:45 GMT -5
Magnificent stuff! All the things you spin out of Three Drinks too. Just a quick, and very thin thought: Could it be that the daylight savings switch is somehow mirrored in two precise-but-not-really references to numbers in Arms And Hearts and Lord I'm Discouraged? "His visits they only take five or six minutes", and "to me it felt like six or seven seconds" - these lines have always sound a bit weird to me. What's supposed to be the real life difference between five and six minutes, or six and seven seconds (apart from the obvious band reference in the latter)? With the daylight savings occuring on the night of the party, it could make sense that Craig mix up these numbers to underline the uncertainty about the duration of the events. Different clocks could give different answers. My take on that would be to say that there's a few different things in play here (these points are mostly pretty obvious, I'm just trying to tease them out in an orderly way). First of all, Craig uses uncertainty to downplay and deflect attention all the time: "pretty," "pretty much," "I guess," "you could say," "some chick," "some guy," etc. I think "five or six minutes" and "six or seven seconds" are examples of that minimizing vagueness. (The reality beneath both expressions is momentous and heavy: it takes Mary a few minutes to suck off the dealer from the north side in payment for her drugs; Charlemagne felt only a few seconds go by between being blinded by the bright light of the projector, and finding himself switched into Gideon's body.) Another thing Craig does all the time is exploit a chance to work in a second or third layer of meaning: as you say, "7 Seconds" [A&H] is one of those; the Number of the Beast "666" [ILtL] is another. So I don't think we're supposed to be in real doubt about "was it five minutes? or six?" This transaction between Mary and the dealer is a regular thing ("his visits"), and it takes a few minutes for her to complete it. Similarly, we're not supposed to be in real doubt about "six seconds? or seven?"; he's just turned "a few seconds" into "six or seven seconds" so he could get the 7 Seconds reference in there. Similarly, we're not supposed to be in real doubt about when dawn occurred on Sunday at Party Zero; he just saw an opportunity to use the actual hour to get a reference to 666 in there. Another way to look at it is to note that Craig *started* with a basic plot rooted in concrete, real-world dates and places, and *then*, once he had that in hand, he was able to use those concrete realities to spin up new material as much as he wanted. To take a trivial example: part of the story is set at the brewery; the brewery has these huge, light-red brick buildings overlooking Swede Hollow; at some point he riffs off that real-world fact and calls the brewery "big pink" in allusion to the house used by The Band. That wasn't something he had in mind when he first put the story together; but it was available to him because he had a real setting to draw from. To take a major example: part of the story happens to be set on Easter Sunday 1994; at some point he riffs off that real-world date to work in a whole layer of allusions to Christianity and Jesus' death on the cross and resurrection. Again, this wasn't something he had in mind when he first put the story together; it was just available to him because he had a real setting to draw from. (How do we know that all of the Christian stuff is spun up as an afterthought? Because we know that his first use of a term loaded with Christian significance, namely "resurrection" in the first verse of Emperor, is actually a reference to Common's 1995 hip-hop hit, rather than anything in the gospels; for that discussion, as well as the Labor Day weekend rather than Easter context, see REAR VIEW MIRROR above.) In the same way, with the 1994 setting, he had a real-world calendar as a basis on which to improvise; the fateful dawn happened to coincide with the imposition of daylight savings time, so it was around 6am; he could exploit that to get a reference to the Number of the Beast. It's just poetic opportunism, of which Craig happens to be a world-class master. That was a bit of a ramble, hope it makes sense. On the same note, I'm about to set out the summary of the The LBI now, hoping to lock down a pretty wide-ranging discussion in very plain detail. If there's anything about the literal events of this "chapter" that still isn't clear after that, please let me know and I'll try to clear it up before we move on.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 8, 2021 6:49:18 GMT -5
CALENDAR: FIRST PASSWe've come all this way without talking about a calendar yet, but now we're finally ready to take a crack at it. ***We know that The LBI takes place on Labor Day weekend (see LABOR DAY above). To this, we can add a key piece of information supplied by Jeep Beep Suite. After the Eyepatch Guy picks Juanita up "at the airport" [JBS], and they've been drinking in the Jeep trying to get themselves clean, he says (and it's he, the Narrator, who's speaking, not Juanita; see TWO TWENTIES above): tried to make ourselves clean tried to make ourselves sparkle, i mean india seems just like a dream i left with five bucks and i lived for five months like a queen [JBS] Foreshadowing Gideon's "went down with like fourteen bucks" [BBlues] trip to the metal bar party, the Narrator's "left with five bucks" refers to his original ride down to Party Zero with Dwight (see THE RIDE above) and subsequent inability to come up with $20 to save his "life" (see HALF DEAD, THE JOKE, and TWO TWENTIES above). Since then he's been living like a queen ("queen"=male homosexual: gdict), blowing gangsters at the Return Parties to support his habit. [*1] *All of which took five months, start to finish.* ***Let's push this further. The party part of The LBI was both kicked off and broken up on Friday night [TLaDiLBI]. Since then they've been "up all night getting drunk and weird" [Emperor], trying to make themselves clean; which means it's now Saturday in the wee hours of the morning. If we look at the date of Saturday of Labor Day weekend for every year from 1985 through 1995, take that as the end point, and subtract five months to get the starting point, we see that in four out of those 11 years --- 1986, 1988, 1991, and 1994 --- the start falls *exactly* on Easter Sunday. (In the remaining years, Easter is at least a week and in some cases a couple of weeks off.) In other words, Party Zero, the original "weekender" and "three-day rave" [PSunglasses], took place on Easter weekend. Just as they did with The LBI, the gangsters took advantage of the holiday, marked by lax security at the brewery, to throw their party (see FIRST BUST above); the three-day run from Friday to Sunday (see THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS and DAWN above) turns out to have been the span between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. [*2] ***The next obvious question to ask is whether we can identify the *calendar year* in which the story takes place. Prescription Sunglasses, which describes the "three-day rave," was recorded in 1994 (see ORDERED CATALOG above), making that the latest possible setting for these events. References to, for example, the Agnostic Front [TGatSD] and Skoal Bandits [Bears] put the earliest possible date in the mid-80's; from what we've followed of the history of the brewery it's clear, in fact, that it can hardly predate the mid-90's. But the evidence that clinches the date is provided by the car wash that anchors the Jeep Encounter scene; as we've shown, a car wash (the Downtowner) first appeared at the 7th St & Kittson St location in 1993-94 (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above). The only possible year with the correct five-month spread between Party Zero and The LBI, then, is 1994. This is the date that makes the most sense in any event. Craig is a writer whose method is known to rely on eavesdropping, compulsive note-taking, and the observation of concrete details; it's only expected that he would spin up the story out of the world that was actually in front of him while he was writing it. There is also this scrap of evidence from Double Straps: and now you're 24 and the shore's a bore everybody's waitin on the very same score [DStraps] which we now recognize as a reference to The LBI ("the shore," and see especially BORED above), meaning that the Narrator's turned 24 just ahead of Labor Day weekend. A 1994 setting for these events puts the Narrator's date of birth in late August 1971, a birth date shared with the THS Narrator (born between September 1970 and September 1971: heregoes) and Craig Finn, whose alter ego he is (born on August 22, 1971: wikipedia). The Sunday of Party Zero is April 3, 1994. The Saturday of the Jeep Encounter is September 3, 1994. With these two anchors in place, we can start to lay out a calendar, with more detail to come:
1994 ----- FRI APR 01 - Ride in Dwight's car down to brewery SUN APR 03 - Easter Sunday. Party Zero assault MON AUG 22 - Narrator turns 24 WED AUG 31 - Narrator leaves apartment, moves into Jeep FRI SEP 02 - Return to brewery for The LBI costume party SAT SEP 03 - Jeep Encounter. Juanita leaves with gangsters
[*1] The summer leading up to The LBI on Labor Day --- the summer of the Return Parties --- is evidently the original of the "cocksucking summer" in the alternate Swish lyrics ( heregoes): It was a blockbuster summer Moving pictures got us through to September They made a movie about me and you They made it half nude and half true It was a bloodsucking [alt: cocksucking] summer I spent half the time trying to get paid from our savior Swishing though the City Center I did a couple favors for these guys who looked like Tusken Raiders [Swish] This is the LP summer in its essence: the alpha couple (a) aren't having sex with each other, and (b) are sucking a lot of cock for an uncertain payout. [*2] Note that dawn on Easter weekend 1994 shifted from 5:51am to 6:49am, due to the clock change for daylight savings; the "6 6 6 am on the weekend" [ILtL] framing is necessarily approximate, but correct ( link):
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 8, 2021 6:25:00 GMT -5
I love the stuff about The Jeep Encounter, and it makes totally sense to see/hear it as a origin story - a sort of a crossroad, where the Alpha Couple almost re-connect, but where the female part of the couple breaks it off, and heads into something dark and murky. Dark and murky is right! A lot of the LP story is somewhat familiar from THS, but what's coming up in the next "chapter" is pretty new, and yeah, it's heavy. I don't think you've mentioned it, but with the emphasis on drinking to come down, it's quite easy for the mind to wander back to Three Drinks as well. "It takes 1 2 3 drinks And now she’s not so frightened It takes 4 and 5 and 6 And then she’s sick But in the hour in between She feels holy and redeemed Blessed and blissful. Painless and serene" and "It goes 7 8 9 For a while I thought she died But she was smiling when she was rolling back her eyes" Great call. The bit about "now she's not so frightened" makes it clear that "1 2 3 drinks" are drinks in the sense of the "Tequila takeoff," where tequila implies margarita implies roofied drink implies drugs; Went down on the Denver slums and she woke up in the Rocky Mountain dawn. Felt all freed up from the fears that you can never put your finger on [MM] Same thing for "rolling back her eyes" --- it's not alcohol that does that, but drugs: these kids want something new to get their eyes rollin back into their dreams [LGI] Doubting Thomas had the party supplies He said he likes how it looks When I roll back my eyes [NRoof] (Compare the second verse of Mission Viejo, too, where the rolling eyes back after shooting up isn't explicit, but implied.) We've already noted that "sick" is regularly used in reference to coming down (see THE QUEUE above). So "4 and 5 and 6" are consistent with the clear beer "Tecate landing." So "drinks" in this song is evidently switching back and forth between a metaphor for drugs --- which isn't new: we've noted many times that "beers"=meth, "water"=meth, "drink"=PCP (see LISTED above) --- and literal alcohol. In fact, the framing is the same as the framing of the Jeep Encounter: first it's Tequila takeoff [1 2 3]. Tecate landing [4 5 6]. but the attempt to clean up doesn't quite take: Tecate landing [4 5 6]. Tequila takeoff [7 8 9]. What's presented here is a general picture of a girl struggling with addiction, not a detailed narrative; but as far as that framing is concerned, it looks like it owes its origin to the Jeep Encounter, too.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 7, 2021 5:27:17 GMT -5
JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGINOne aspect of the Jeep Encounter that we have to stop to appreciate is the sheer extent to which it's reused by Craig in his later work. Again (see KATRINA above), one of the hardest-to-accept conclusions of the Here Goes thread was its claim about the THS characters switching bodies and souls, culminating in the backseat Crucifixion Cruise scene in which Charlemagne's-soul-in-Gideon's-body meets Holly's-soul-in-Mary's-body and everything goes off the rails. I still think the arguments advanced for this reading in Here Goes stand on their own; but there's no denying that it's a complex plot twist, and fantastical, and that it requires a certain suspension of disbelief. What we see now, though, is that the THS Crucifixion Cruise is merely the elaboration of a far simpler LP Jeep Encounter, in which the the double identities of the-Eyepatch-Guy-in-the-Narrator's-body and Katrina-in-Juanita's-body require no suspension of disbelief whatever --- both kids are literally in costume --- and in which the kisses and the failure to perform sexually set a straightforward baseline for the fantastical THS reworking to come. Compare the experiences of the LP alpha couple with those of Charlemagne/Gideon and Holly/Mary during the Crucifixion Cruise: Same kooks don't shoot but they sure do sniff Same kooks can't fly because their wings are clipped Same kooks can't come but they sure do kiss Making love to the girls with the wrapped up wrists [SK] And there's much more. We've seen other LP scenes that end up reflected in more than one episode of the THS story, but nothing on this scale; the alpha couple's failed connection in the Jeep is the source of more THS plot development than any other single event in the world of Lifter Puller, and it's not close. ***To review, the Jeep Encounter: - is the origin of the backseat Crucifixion Cruise debacle, and, as such, the occasion for appealing to the wisdom of Sal Paradise: "Boys and girls in America, they have such a sad time together" [SBS].
- is the origin of Charlemagne obsessively kissing, but carefully not fucking, Holly ("a movie about me and you/ They made it half nude and half true" [Swish]; heregoes).
- is the origin of Jesse falling hard for Charlemagne, the one guy who doesn't take advantage of her availability for sex, but who instead helps her get cleaned up (heregoes).
- is half of the origin of Gideon's riverbank attempt to lure Holly into sex with the offer of meth ("Hey sweet recovery, come on, won't you wade into the water with me?" [BCamp]). Like Juanita (see UNDER WATER above), Holly declines sex because she doesn't want it once she's high; but Gideon suggests, ironically, that she's declining because she's trying to get clean ("sweet recovery"). This difficult packing of two takes on the situation is explained by the fact that there are *two* LP episodes contributing to the one THS scene: the Narrator holding Juanita's head under water on the one hand (see UNDER WATER above), *and also* Juanita's sobered-up "Tecate landing" followed by her "chalk outline" death at the hands of the parking lot gangster on the other.
- is the origin of Jesse's romantic obsession with trysts in cars (heregoes). She's obsessed with "heaven" [WCGT], described more specifically as "paradise by the dashboard light" [WCGT, CSongs]; when Charlemagne refers to her "place that always makes you smile" [HJ], it must be that he's referring, either literally or in shadow, to the Kittson Street parking lot under the 7th Street bridge.
- is the origin of the Narrator's admonition to Jesse: "I'm sure they'll come up in the parking lots and at parties" [WaW]; her experience with Charlemagne there is why Jesse, unlike Juanita, "never gets in their cars" [Spinners].
- is the origin of Mary's "Noli Me Tangere" belief that Charlemagne, her Christ, has told her not to touch/go down on him (heregoes).
- is the origin of Holly's rides in the gangsters' "big black cars" [BCamp] and "GTOs" [CSongs].
- is, similarly, the origin of Mary's "Out on the parkways after the parties/ It was always arousing when they'd rev up their engines" [OftC].
- is the origin of Holly's "It's my party and I'll die if I want to" [HF] (compare Juanita's volitional "chalk outline" in the parking lot, after her LBI costume party).
- is the origin of the THS Narrator and Mary sitting in her car while she tells him about her life [Esther].
- is the origin (compare the Narrator reversing course and offering her Sudafeds when she gets angry, see REAR VIEW MIRROR above) of Charlemagne suddenly giving in to Mary's demand for drugs, but not being able to deliver: "We'll hook it all up/ I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain" [DLME].
- is the origin, in solo song Jester And June, of an alternative future history in which the alpha couple (both with fake identities) return to the parking lot in the hopes that she'll remember: "Now the cops got our names/ As Justin and Jane/ The only people waiting at the car wash in the rain" [J&J].
***If we dilate out even a little bit from the failed connection, there are even more echoes of this episode. We mentioned above that Juanita's hope to be taken "away into fortune or fame" [CaAoC] prefigures Holly's hope of getting to California (see JUST STARTED TALKING above). We know that Holly eventually takes up the offer from the "kid from California [who] turned out to be an asshole" [MINTS] to go out there, and ends up doing porn. The development of that story is told in Eureka, with lots of sketchy detail filling out the middle and end of the song; but if we reread the opening verses with Juanita and the Eyepatch Guy in mind, we immediately recognize the parallels: It was a strange request and they'd just barely met But somehow he didn't seem like a stranger. She knew what her sister always said about the angels. How they show up when you never expect them. And she never expected. When she was mostly in the phone booth at the end of her rope. Spending half her time just hope hope hoping. Then someone finally showed up with a shot at the coast. So she gets in the car and they go [Eureka] It matches the story at such a rich level of detail: "it was a strange request" (ostensibly "lookin for a fire lighter for hire," but certainly 'come with me and have some wine'), "they'd just barely met" ("hey my name's juanita"), "somehow he didn't seem like a stranger" (the Narrator under the eyepatch). He's catching her at a time when she's "mostly in the phone booth at the end of her rope" (enslaved, "ropes"=roofies, giving blowjobs in the "booths in the back," hanging off the "phone"="hangin off the video games"; see LISTED and BATHROOM STALL above), "spending half her time just hope hope hoping" (half dead). Then we get a jump cut past the jeep to the end of the night, and the gangster who drives away with her: "Then someone finally showed up with a shot at the coast/ So she gets in the car and they go." (It's a jump cut in the sense that, if we didn't know better, we'd think we were still talking about the angel-stranger; but we're not.) ***Even more eye-opening, look at the solo song Wild Animals: The Dominican restaurant, a difficult dress With burlap and feathers pressed up against mesh Man alive and the spirit put to death in the flesh She had quite a few drinks You had one or two less She said "Hey, thanks for coming Can I ask you a question?" Man alive and the spirit put to death in the flesh [Wild Animals] Here, we start with a girl clothed in the "indian" costume from The LBI, in the just-raided "restaurant" ("And the cops they all crowded around us" [Wild Animals]; see THE KITCHEN and LP SHADOWS above) of the "Lord" ("Dominican": link). She's accompanied by a man whose spirit has been "put to death" in the flesh, like the THS Narrator who "died" to become "the new kid" inhabiting the same body (see ORIGINS OF IMAGES and HALF DEAD above), which now appears to be a THS reflection of the LP Narrator becoming the Eyepatch Guy. This is followed by the girl having quite a few drinks together with her slightly less intoxicated companion, very like the Narrator and Juanita drinking clear beer/wine in the Jeep. This in turn is followed by her thanking him for coming, a gesture easily ascribed to Juanita thanking the Eyepatch Guy (who she thinks she's never met) for coming to her costume party. Finally, she asks him a question, in parallel with "could you be the boy who takes me away into fortune or fame?" ***Dwelling for a moment on that last point: the quiet insistence on the alpha girl's question here is slightly unsettling. It's framed differently in different places: could you be the boy who takes me away into fortune or fame? [CaAoC] she put her mouth around a difficult question She said Lord, what do you recommend to a real sweet girl who's made some not-sweet friends? Lord, what do you prescribe to a real soft girl who's having real hard times? [CC] can i ask you a question? [Wild Animals] The times when we're told what the question is, it's diverted into a wish for fortune or a plea for drugs; at the end, what remains is only the fact of the question itself. I have no reason to think we're missing something, per se. But it seems that we're here in the presence of something important, and still not totally known.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 4, 2021 8:23:00 GMT -5
INDIAN FRINGESNow that the events of the Jeep Encounter are established in sufficient detail for us to be able to recognize allusions to it, it's worth going back to tidy up two ambiguities: (1) the beverage on offer in the Jeep; (2) the indian fringes. ***1) The BeverageThere's a lot of evidence that the Narrator and Juanita were drinking wine in the Jeep, and a lot of evidence that they were drinking beer. In cases where Craig's lyrics present strong ambiguities between two readings, the answer is usually not one or the other, but both, and this case doesn't even really involve an ambiguity; there is, after all, no reason why the Narrator couldn't have had both wine and beer stashed behind the seats, and that Juanita couldn't have drunk a lot of both. But to summarize the evidence: Beer- "we've got clear beer, i think you're gonna like it" [Emperor]: unambiguous evidence that the Narrator offered Juanita beer.
- "Tequila takeoff, Tecate landing" [EC]: unambiguous evidence that the alpha girl was in fact drinking clear beer.
- "the crowd cheered when she threw up her beer" [TLaDiLBI]: unambiguous evidence that Juanita had been drinking quantities of beer.
Wine- "we mixed the ripple and the champagne" [CaAoC]: unambiguous evidence that Juanita was drinking wine, possibly champagne.
- "Now we just need something to celebrate/ I wanna open some bottles up/ I'm getting tired/ Of all these styrofoam coffee cups" [SK]: a THS reflection of the Jeep Encounter (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above), with again an allusion to champagne in "celebrate." The "styrofoam coffee cups" detail is compelling evidence that she's drinking wine, rather than beer.
- "We spent a few months just wandering the Sonoma" [MoC]: a distant THS reflection of the LP event, but unambiguous evidence for wine.
- "Flat champagne and inbound trains" [Spinners]: no more than the reflection of a reflection, but again suggestive of wine (=literal "flat champagne"), and maybe actual champagne.
- Even in a THS-only world, Mary's characteristic wine-drinking already appeared to be focused on the Crucifixion Cruise backseat as her Wedding at Cana moment (heregoes); now that we see this episode as a reflection of the LP Jeep Encounter, it seems especially likely that the wine theme has a concrete origin with Juanita in the Jeep.
Both- "She had quite a few drinks/ You had one or two less" [WA]: only a reflection, but "drinks" is ambiguous (though more suggestive of beer than wine. We'll link this line to the Jeep Encounter in JEEP ENCOUNTER: ORIGIN below).
- "The banquet beers with emotions and wine" [R&T]: clear beer (Coors, the Banquet Beer) and wine both explicitly mentioned in the context of a wedding.
- "White wine and some tallboy cans" [YGD]: only a reflection, and unconnected to further context; but in view of their combination as a regular theme, a strong suggestion that both beer and wine were involved.
***I think the way to read this evidence, both in terms of its literal meaning and its evolution through successive reuse of the same story elements, is as follows: In the original Lifter Puller story, Juanita and the Narrator were drinking both clear beer in tallboy cans, and cheap white wine (not red; it's Labor Day weekend and it's hot) in styrofoam cups. The Narrator's living-in-his-car status leads to the hobo wine "ripple and the champagne" joke. The stage is set for later elaboration of beer, wine, and champagne themes in THS and elsewhere. In the main THS reworking, this episode is recast as the Crucifixion Cruise and failed Wedding at Cana, for which wine (Jesus' water-into-wine miracle), "banquet" beers and champagne are all appropriate celebratory beverages. But like Juanita and the Narrator failing to "connect," the wedding fails, which is Holly's point in saying "now we just need something to celebrate" [SK]; she's not satisfied, and like Juanita, of whom she is here the reflection, her thoughts turn to the gangsters who can hook her up with the real stuff: - "I want to open some bottles up": "bottle" is slang for penis (gdict); like Juanita, Holly's getting agitated, and ready to go back and suck dicks for drugs again. (The other transparent use of "bottles" for "dicks" in LP is the Star Wars Hips sketch of Party Zero as the adventure of a "couple debutants" with "a hundred bottles of wine" [SWH]; the same meaning appears to be subtext in Brokerdealer's Give Me Back My Body, THS' Touchless, and solo song Plattsburgh as well.)
- "I want to open my body up" [the background voice in Same Kooks]: this has a double meaning, referring both to Holly wanting sex in the backseat, with her "legs wide open on the opening night" [NS], and also to the act of suicide (see "razor blades" [SK]) implicit in going back to the gangsters to get high again. In both respects, Holly appears as a reflection of Juanita, who wants to fuck the Eyepatch Guy but doesn't get to, and who willingly leaves the Jeep to become a "chalk outline" resurrected as Katrina (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE above).
- "I'm getting tired of all these styrofoam coffee cups": she's getting tired of the wine; in thinking of what she really wants, she gratuitously describes the cups as "coffee" cups, where "coffee" is slang for meth ("Biker's Coffee"=meth, compare "biker drugs" [TMS], and see LISTED above).
In the secondary THS reworking of this material, "flat champagne" [Spinners] alludes to Jesse's failure to finally win Charlemagne through *their* car trysts (compare "She never gets in their cars" [Spinners]; none of her later suitors meet the standard of Charlemagne). ***2) Indian FringesWe've established that the "indian fringes" refer, in the first place, to the costume worn by Juanita to The LBI party, the costume that she is in fact wearing all throughout the Jeep Encounter (see COSTUME PARTY above). With this knowledge, we can see that the "india" metaphor in the Jeep Beep Suite account of the alpha couple trying to get clean in the Jeep refers not just to the Aveda line of beauty products (see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above), but to her costume as well: tried to make ourselves clean tried to make ourselves sparkle, i mean india seems just like a dream [JBS] That's quite a pun on "indian." There's enough ambiguity in Craig's use of "fringes," too, that it's hard not to hear the full phrase as a reference to a place, as well as a costume. With what we've learned about the LP story, we're now in a position to clear this up. Costume- "your friend in the indian fringes looked an awful lot like frampton" [LPvtEotE]: unambiguous reference to a costume.
- "She appeared faithless in fringes and feathers" [SShoes]: unambiguous reference to a costume.
Place- "It's a small scene already and it gets dirty on the fringes" [MM]: unambiguous reference to a place.
- "So park it up and hit the locks/ Our lives play out in parking lots/ The prayers against the chemistry/ On the fringes of the scene" [Tracking Shots]: an unambiguous reference to a place, and an impossible-to-miss recap of the Jeep Encounter.[*1]
Both- "woke up with your friend in the indian fringes" [SH1999]: can be easily read as referring both to a costume and a place (somewhat stronger reading for the latter).
- "We got wrapped up in the indian fringes" [SPayne]: strongly suggests a place, but can still be read as a costume reference (compare "wrapped in tattered taffeta" [Brokerdealer INFHP], "wrapped up in robes" [Riptown]).
***It's clear, then, that the "fringes" are also a reference to the area around The City, i.e, around the brewery bar, Swede Hollow park, the Kittson Street parking lot, and the banks of the Mississippi River, a usage echoed in "edges" ("It was dark along the edges of the city" [SM]), "side" ("The east side is where we met with those guys" [SPayne]), and possibly "margin" ("now let's get a little marginal" [CRoom]). But what about specifically "indian" fringes suggests this geographical usage? It turns out that the path-crossed parkland along the banks of the Mississippi River in downtown St. Paul belongs to Indian Mounds Park, named for the Native American burial mounds that once covered the area. The Mounds Boulevard exit and Mounds Boulevard itself, which take the kids from the highway directly to Swede Hollow and environs (see NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT and REAR VIEW MIRROR above), take their name from these same mounds, and the wikipedia article on the park connects the mounds with the "railroad yard" [LA] as well ( wikipedia): [*1] "Hit the locks" indicates that the Narrator, being surrounded by the gangsters in the lot, did the obvious thing and locked the doors when he and Juanita climbed into the Jeep.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 3, 2021 5:27:40 GMT -5
BALTIMORE BELTLINETime, finally, to ask: where exactly is the parking lot? ***It's been clear all along that the lot is located somewhere near the western end of the foot paths that wind through Swede Hollow (see AIRPORT & LBI and LEAVING above). But with the new information that it's located next to the railroads ("there's always trash hanging out at the track" [TGatSD], see REAR VIEW MIRROR above), we can narrow it down further. Here's an aerial image of the area, in which the railroad tracks are visible running through from NW to SE. The situation of the image with respect to established landmarks is shown by two chokepoints that the kids pass through on their way to/from the parties at the brewery bar: - yellow X: the "7th street entry" [BBreathing] where the footpath through Swede Hollow passes under East 7th St and into the park.
- yellow Y: the top of the Mounds Boulevard entrance/exit ramp to/from I-94 ("the exit by the campus" [Emperor]), by which Dwight's taxi and the other cars enter and leave the area.
The red letters, A-G, all represent candidates for the parking lot of the story. We'll examine them one at a time, enumerating the points for and against each. ***A) The actual parking lot of Swede Hollow park itself (street view: link) PRO: Of all the candidates, this is the closest to the brewery bar (about 1/2 mile away by foot); it's both directly connected to the paths through the park and adjacent to the railroad tracks. CON: There are lots of reasons to doubt that this is the lot in question. First, it's tiny, with only 8 parking spaces (excluding those for disabled motorists). Second, because of the way the bluffs are situated, it hardly provides a view of the railroad at all (see the street view link). Third, it belongs to the park and is located on a major thoroughfare: even back in the early 90's (when the area was rougher than it is now), a car left parked there for a weekend would attract police attention, as would a crowd of "heshers hanging on the hoods of the cars" [TCMaMG]. It seems unlikely that this is the lot we're looking for. ***B) The parking lot of the electrical substation on Commercial Street (street view: link) PRO: Connected by footpaths, secluded. CON: Doesn't overlook, and isn't even adjacent to, the railroad tracks. Very small lot. Close to a mile from brewery. Presence of cars might not attract attention quickly, but (due to public infrastructure) would certainly elicit a response once noticed. Can't be this either. ***C) Parking lots behind Minnesota State Government buildings on Lafayette Rd (street view: link) PRO: Spacious lot, overlooking tracks. Accessible on foot via informal path across tracks further south. CON: Not particularly close to brewery (3/4 of a mile); more importantly, the gangsters couldn't use a state government parking lot without attracting instant attention. Zero chance that this is the lot. ***D) The lot behind the present-day Minnesota Music Cafe on Payne Avenue (street view: link) PRO: Adjacent to tracks, sort of overlooks them. Close to the brewery (1/2 mile) and readily accessible on foot. CON: As with (A) above, the bluffs interfere substantially with the view of the tracks. The lot is bigger than (A) but not much bigger. More importantly, it's a private lot, and certain to be watched over the course of a weekend. Doesn't seem likely that this is it. ***E) The easternmost lot of the Union Depot train station (street view from overpass running above: link) PRO: This is not only adjacent to the tracks, but has such a great view of them that there's a picnic area (appearing on the satellite view above) set up next to the lot to take in the view. The lot is enormous, and being the one furthest from the train station, it's largely empty (again see satellite view). CON: It's paid parking for the station (street view: link), meaning that vehicles left there overnight would be subject to scrutiny. It's not really secluded, meaning that heshers on the hoods of the cars would attract attention. It's also far from the bar, and the path (via the 4th Street underpass) is indirect, making it at least a full mile on foot. Doesn't seem possible that this is the lot. ***F) The undeveloped lot just north of the Union Depot train station parking area (street view with two interesting features, an underpass on the left, and a pretty cool Minnesota musical reference on the right: link) PRO: Unlike the paid parking lot for the station, this area is open for anyone to drive their car into. It's big. And it has something else important: the underpass on the left of the street view image above is the *only* bridge with a railroad passing over it in the entire area. Strictly speaking, it's an underpass, not a proper bridge, and there's very little room (even taking into account the second section 30 yards further east, see street view from far end: link) to congregate and drink beneath it; but it's really tempting to see this and to connect "back then we used to drink beneath this railroad bridge" [YLHF] with the Jeep Encounter in the parking lot. CON: It's closer than the station lot, but still about a mile away from the brewery bar. It's obviously not a public access lot, and it's in full view of the station lot gatehouse, so cars or kids would still attract attention. And as tempting as the "railroad bridge" identification is, it's really hard to imagine the kids leaving the lot to go drink in the cramped, wet space of that underpass. Probably the best candidate so far, but it still doesn't seem possible that this is the lot. ***G) The Kittson Street parking lot in the dead-end loop across the train tracks from the park entrance (street view from the northern end: link; street view from the southern end: link; street view from the middle looking east over the tracks: link) This, now, is attention-getting. Consider the points in favor: - It's very close to the brewery bar, only a couple hundred feet beyond the parking lot of the park itself (A).
- It's accessible on foot; in the satellite photo you can see the unpaved but well-worn path that leads from behind the present-day Minnesota Music Cafe straight across the tracks to the Kittson Street lot. See also the street view and close-up satellite photos at the end of the post.
- It's right next to, and overlooks, the railroad tracks.
- It's a large parking lot, with room for a lot of cars.
- It's an actual parking lot, so you're allowed to park your car there, plus it's not paid parking and it's not a private lot, so you can leave it there, or sit on it all night, without attracting attention. It's no-man's land.
- It's in a sunken area, passed only by local traffic speeding down the Lafayette Bridge exit ramp, in a dead-end loop, half-hidden under the 7th Street overpass, and in great part blocked from view by the shadow of the car wash next to it. It's the definition of secluded.
That this, far and away the best of all the candidates, is the parking lot we're looking for is confirmed twice: 1) It's located directly beneath a railroad bridge --- not a railroad going over a bridge, as we might have expected, but *a bridge going over a railroad.* The line "back then we used to drink beneath this railroad bridge" [YLHF] is in fact a THS reflection of the Jeep Encounter. 2) The same "trash" (gangsters) from "trash hanging out at the track" [TGatSD] appears a second time in The Mezzanine Gypoff, in connection with the Narrator losing his limousine license (see REAR VIEW MIRROR above); there, Juanita is described resorting to the trash's stash in the attempt to wash herself clean: i lost my limousine license i took a little tip from the way insider wrote it on her hip with a magic marker washed it all off with a warm wet wash cloth stashed in the trash back behind the car wash [TMG] which is consistent with the description of the kids in Jeep Beep Suite, already established to be primarily about The LBI (see COSTUME PARTY, COMMEMORATIVE PLATES, TWO AT A TIME, and THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above): entertaining the soldiers, makin eyes at the sailors and we walked between these velvet ropes, went straight for the bathroom soap tried to make ourselves clean tried to make ourselves sparkle, i mean india seems just like a dream i left with five bucks and i lived for five months like a queen [JBS] as well as Holly's statement in the THS version of this event in Same Kooks: She said it's hard to feel holy when you can't get clean Now she's bumping up against the washing machines [SK] That plural "washing machines" may have an immediate THS referent in Charlemagne's-soul-plus-Gideon's-body in the Crucifixion Cruise backseat, but it has the shadow of the Lifter Puller parking lot gangsters all over it. To sum up, the "trash hanging out at the track" is the same as "the trash back behind the car wash"; these are references to the same scene in the Kittson Street lot, overlooking the track, and situated behind the car wash. [*1] ***With that, back to The Gin And The Sour Defeat: the newspapers are suppressing information wanna talk about the chick with the chalk outline on the side of the baltimore beltline [TGatSD] It's clear now that the "baltimore beltline" (a railroad: wikipedia) refers to the train track across from the Kittson Street lot; this is where Juanita, having once again been resurrected as Katrina after the failure of the Jeep Encounter, once again "died" (hence the "chalk outline" [TGatSD], compare "chalk on the sidewalks" [LQ]; see HALF DEAD and REAR VIEW MIRROR above). And she didn't just "die": this time, in getting her "ride home" [Emperor] with one of the gangsters, she vanished. That's why the Narrator wants to talk about her; she's literally disappeared, and the newspapers haven't reported a word about her disappearance. But that's the next chapter in the story, which we'll come to (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL below) after closing out The LBI. Images of the Kittson street lot: 1) Street view from the northern end, with a clear view of the footpath down the embankment behind the present-day Minnesota Music Cafe: 2) Street view from the southern end, with a clear view of the situation of the parking lot behind the Downtowner Car Wash: 3) Street view from under the bridge, facing the tracks, again with a view of the footpath (the Narrator's Jeep, parked in the place of one of these cars, looks out on the same view): 4) Satellite view with a closeup of the lot and the worn footpath across the tracks: [*1] I actually wrote to the St. Paul library "Ask A Librarian" service (and sent them a donation --- public libraries FTW) to ask them to check the St. Paul Yellow Pages from the late 80's and early 90's, and can confirm that the Downtowner Car Wash (now Mister Car Wash, but see the street view image from the south above) was the first car wash to appear in this location, and that it opened here in 1993-94. Note that the Downtowner Car Wash does not appear in the 1992 St. Paul Yellow Pages (first image), but does appear in the 1994 version (second image). From 1992: From 1994:
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 2, 2021 8:34:56 GMT -5
REAR VIEW MIRRORAt this point we've examined enough key elements of the Jeep Encounter to put them all together and fill in the remaining gaps. ***When they first get into the Jeep, Juanita's in rocky shape: only high enough to be semi-stable, and that not for long. The Narrator gets her drinking, talking, and smoking cigarettes, trying to ease her down for a "Tecate landing" [EC]: she smoked and I made some progress [Sublet] smokin and drinkin, gettin sick trying to kick [LiaL] As Juanita re-emerges from her suppressed state (as Katrina's "sublet"), she beomes more human, but also more unstable as her jones kicks in. The talking brings them close; coming close, they kiss; with the kissing, things heat up; in the heat of the moment, she tries to go down on him. But when her overture elicits no response, she's hurt, and loses her tenuous grip on herself completely. ***From Lazy Eye, we know that she cries, and that she leaves the Jeep to go to another car (see LAZY EYE above). This is confirmed by Bruce Bender, in which the Narrator relates that he kissed her "goodnight": kissed you goodnight once or twice in my car i detest the midwest, but the east is a priest and all these greasers are creeps, throwin rocks at my jeep [BBender] The "greasers" are the gangsters (see HESHERS above), scattered around his Jeep in the parking lot: heshers hangin on the hoods of the cars [TCMaMG] The lot where the Narrator is parked is the same lot where Dwight left his car during the weekend of Party Zero (before having the kids "walk the remainder" [YDGK] through the park to the brewery; see BALTIMORE BELTLINE below). The gangsters who've driven to The LBI are using this same lot; the ones who made it safely past the raiding cops to their "subway" (see FIRST BUST and THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above) have regrouped here afterward, at a safe distance from the site of the raid. For as long as the Narrator continues to make progress with Juanita, the surrounding heshers, with their whispered offers of meth ("creeps throwing rocks," where "rocks"=meth, see LISTED above; compare "I'm sure they'll come up in the parking lots and at parties" [WaW]; for "whispers" see TWO AT A TIME above), can be kept at bay. But when she becomes violently distressed at his lack of response, he loses control of the situation: fuck intimacy, now she wants speed again. Hysterically, she demands that he give her something to get her high, like what the gangsters are offering. ***The Narrator's response to this demand is documented in Emperor [*1]: and i've got stuff to pick you up, what were you expecting? [Emperor] Trying to save the situation, he says that he'll give her what she wants, [*2] and pulls out a bottle of amphetamines ... but they're only Sudafeds. We've already seen that "her vision's kinda cloudy" in the opening verse of TLaDiLBI refers to the Jeep Encounter (see LAZY EYE above), and the next line of the song [*3] does too: the sudafeds are downs, the crowd cheered when she threw up her beer [TLaDiLBI] Sudafeds *are* amphetamines, not downers; but Juanita wants meth, and for her this lightweight over-the-counter shit is worse than nothing. Angrily, she shoves open the door of the Jeep, the exertion making her throw up all the beer the Narrator's been plying her with, while the lurking gangsters cheer. [*4] A snapshot of this moment is captured in The Gin And The Sour Defeat (also about The LBI, as we've seen, see FIRST BUST and JUST STARTED TALKING above) as well: there's always chicks throwing up in my car there's always trash hanging out at the track they got their copenhagen hats [TGatSD] Several important details here come in for comment: - "trash" is the gangsters, the ones carrying roofies ("roach clips," see LISTED above), the tweaky "trashers" of Viceburgh.
- "the track" is a reference to the railroad tracks in the vicinity of the Party Pit (Swede Hollow) and the brewery. The main Swede Hollow parking lot (on the opposite end of the park from the brewery) overlooks a major artery of these tracks, but so do several other lots in the vicinity; more on this shortly (see BALTIMORE BELTLINE below).
- the "copenhagen hats" are painter's caps promoting Copenhagen chewing tobacco (compare Skoal chewing tobacco, referenced in The Bears); the connection to the "painter's cap" [HM] worn by newly-jumped-in gangster Gideon is self-evident (compare also the liner-note alternate lyrics to Sangre De Stephanie). These hats aren't merely a true-to-life detail of gangster fashions at that place and time; in the same way that Skoal bandits and menthol tobacco serve as a drug metaphor (see "Mint," "Fresh," and "Menthol" at LISTED above), so the Copenhagen branding is here being framed as an advertisement for drugs concealed under the hatband (see "beneath your baseball cap" [DStraps], "blues from his hatband" [LDoL], and SHOES AND SOCKS above). Finally, note that the guys wearing these visored "copenhagen hats" are the same "guys with their eyes in their visors" that appear in Katrina And The K-Hole.
***So Juanita flees the Jeep, drops to her knees, performs her service, gets a hit of real meth, and becomes Katrina again, while the Narrator, still sitting in the driver's seat of the Jeep, takes it all in: and in the rear view mirror i saw the resurrection [Emperor] This is the same reversal of his "progress" [Sublet] that is described in the back half of Entitlement Crew: Tecate landing. Tequila takeoff [EC] It's also the background of the second meaning of a line from The Gin And The Sour Defeat that we've already looked at once (see FIRST BUST above): she says she won't come up for air [TGatSD] He's been working all night to get Juanita to "come up for air" from inside Katrina; but she won't do it. ***Juanita's gone back to the gangsters and turned into Katrina again; now, as foreshadowed by "see you walkin to your car" [LE], she leaves with them. Her resolution to "start all over when she gets there" [LE] is reflected in the "clean break" of Emperor (just as "a quaalude and a vacuum" refers to her getting "quaalude"=drugs for a "vacuum"=blowjob, see SEX FOR DRUGS IN METAPHORS above); in fact, Emperor's entire "moving out" trope is an extended portrait of this same departure: you said your head was finally clear you told me that you're leaving here [Emperor] The Tecate landing was on the point of succeeding ("your head was finally clear"), bringing Juanita back, just for a moment; but now she's leaving again. The extended Emperor metaphor gives more detail about "your car" [LE], i.e. the car in which she leaves: and a quaalude and a vacuum means a clean house and a clean break and her knee shakes but no earthquake and her ride home's on the freeway at the exit by the campus, it's gonna bring her back to connecticut [Emperor] She's jonesing so hard she's shaking; there's another suggestion that she's been on her knees. The Narrator doesn't know where they're going, but in his mind's eye he sees her "ride home" taking her away by the usual route on I-94 (see FRONTAGE ROAD above), accessed via the "exit by the campus," that is, the Mounds Blvd exit by the Metropolitan State University campus, adjacent to the Party Pit: Only she's not getting the usual ride home with Dwight; this time, she's going with the gangsters. The Narrator himself failed to "connect" with her, i.e. either to have sex with her or to give her the drugs she wants (for the definition of "connect" see DRUG SLANG above): and i'm sorry when you came through that we didn't connect [SBackwards] and now she's going "back to connecticut," a place where she's going to "connect" for sure (see GEOGRAPHY: THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above). ***So the Narrator is left sitting in his Jeep while Juanita rides off with the gang to wherever they're going. [*5] Remembering his "i lit her cigarette" [Sublet] from earlier in the night (see JUST STARTED TALKING above), we can put the pieces together and identify this moment as the situation underlying the end of The Mezzanine Gypoff: i lost my limousine license ... i'm just her cigarette lighter and i'm her limousine driver i like to ride inside her [TMG] He wants to fuck her ("i like to ride inside her"); in analogy with Dwight's "taxi," his Jeep is the "limousine" in which he'd hoped to drive her home. But he "lost [his] license," that is, lost his chance both to fuck her and to take her away with him, and now he's left sitting there alone, "lonely in a limousine" [LiaL]. These same details --- the "limousine" is his Jeep; she's been smoking in the passenger seat; he's left alone in the driver's seat to brood on his "shot of straight frustration" [TL] --- let us read the second verse of solo song Indications as an account of the same incident, with confirmation that this was the episode that pushed him over the edge: [*6] Turns out these big black cars aren't really so fancy There's smoke in the seats and the drivers, they get so enraged [Indications] [*1] We can't pass by the opening lines of Emperor without taking a moment to deal with their labored phrasing and generally bizarre placement at the beginning of the song: and i've got stuff to pick you up, what were you expecting? and in the rear view mirror i saw the resurrection [Emperor] The awkwardness of these lines is due to the unusual fact that *Craig is here cobbling his own narrative together out of homages to other songs*. The two halves of the first line are names of songs from Craig's 1994 I've Got Drugs mixtape: I've Got Drugs (The Frogs, 1989) What Did You Expect? (Archers of Loaf, 1994) http://instagr.am/p/B-Zo3qejYJx I've Got Drugs is from The Frogs' "It's Only Right And Natural," an album whose lyrics anticipate many familiar Lifter Puller expressions and themes, including farcical homosexual situations, and whose song titles feature the terms "greaser" and "savior," and "pinned" in a sexual sense. The second line, too, is built from a pair of homages: Rearviewmirror (The Frogs, cover of Pearl Jam song, 1995) Resurrection (Common, 1995) Among the indie/punk titles of the mixtape and the other three songs, the hip-hop hit "Resurrection" looks out of place, but in fact this isn't the only place Craig references it: the second half of the Back In Blackbeard line and now i've done it on the d-line and bathed in all your bass lines [BiB] is lifted from its second verse ( link): I bathe in bass lines [*2] Compare Charlemagne, who, after trying to bring Mary down in the back seat, panicks and promises to give her what she wants: Saint Barbara, I'm calling your name Don't let me blow up We'll hook it all up I guess there's fields of speed where there's fields of grain Saint Barbara, don't let me explode I can feel the whole scene Starting to corrode When we're fooling around on the frontage roads [DLME] [*3] The whole opening verse of TLaDiLBI is about what happens when Juanita leaves the Jeep; "breakdown" looks like an ambiguous reference both to her emotional breakdown in the passenger seat, and to the packet of drugs she got from the gangsters in the parking lot (see TWO TWENTIES above). In the former reading, the first "crowd" refers to Juanita and the Narrator and their alter egos in the Jeep (compare "so many people" [CatCT]); in the second reading, "the crowd cheered" makes an out-of-order reference to what happened before the "breakdown" (an easy stretch in the service of a double entendre). [*4] Juanita throwing up her beer en route to her parking lot "suicide" appears to be another referent of outside the club is where we spill our drinks in memory of all those guys that didn't make it till the dawn [SCity] [*5] This is the second sense of "The Gin And The Sour Defeat" (for the first, see JUST STARTED TALKING above): "gin" as a regular gangster identifier (see LACED SUBSTANCES and LISTED above) signals the Narrator's defeat, in the struggle over Juanita after Dwight's arrest, at the hands of the gang. [*6] This reference to the Narrator's "rage" recalls Charlemagne's backseat plea, "don't let me explode" [DLME]; see footnote [*2] above.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 1, 2021 6:59:30 GMT -5
LAZY EYEThe story of the end of the Jeep Encounter is related in Lazy Eye, told from the perspective of the Narrator as he sits in the driver's seat of the Jeep. It's a simple song; we know enough now to be able to go through the whole thing line by line. ***The first verse begins: let me lick your windows clean, take a clearer look at me [LE] The voice is the Narrator's; talking to Juanita, he thinks: your vision's cloudy with drugs ("her vision's kinda cloudy" [TLaDiLBI]); let me get you cleaned up (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above). get up off your lazy eye and look into my brighter side [LE] Through an impressive fusion of the expression "get up off your lazy ass" ("come on, let's go") with "lazy eye" --- which is both an indictment of Juanita's failure to see, and a way of working in a reference to the Eyepatch Guy via the common name for amblyopia (see EYEPATCH GUY above) --- the Narrator silently chides her: "look at me; don't you recognize the brighter me in here, behind the dark front of the Eyepatch Guy?" and i'm not afraid to quit, i'm just used to it so i deal with it [LE] Juanita *is* afraid to quit; the Narrator has cajoled her into accepting alcohol in lieu of the drugs she wants, taking a hard line that sounds pretty hypocritical coming from an addict who's done a lot of meth tonight himself (see BORED above). But he's not a hypocrite; he's pretty much only going through this to stay after Juanita, and is ready to quit if he can just get her to come away with him. she's takin off her makeup and she knows we'll both be better off without it [LE] Ultimately, his persuasion has prevailed: "takin off her makeup" means she's coming down; she recognizes that it's the better thing for both of them to come down (the metaphorical meaning of "makeup"=drugs explains why *he'll* be better off without it too; see PHARMACY GOODS above). *** let me treat you like a queen, it could boost my self esteem [LE] See the comments about the narrator's self-worth and struggle to recover standing upthread (see ROME and COSTUME PARTY above). dig your nails into my hands when i show you to my friends nitrous oxide laugh at your birthday bash right before you crashed [LE] These are backward-looking references to Party Zero, to the Narrator's crucifixion ("nails into my hands"), Juanita's laugh, and the crash, specifically (see CRUCIFIXION, YOUR LAUGH, and THE CRASH above). she's takin off my glasses and i've only seen her once before without em [LE] Up to this point, the only time the Narrator has seen Juanita without his glasses on was during the Party Zero gangrape (cued by the references to Party Zero in the preceding two lines). "She's takin off my glasses" is not literal, but combines two observations in a double meaning: one, she's making a move on him, trying to initiate sex, which normally would involve the glasses coming off; two, the reason he's not wearing his glasses is because he's got the Eyepatch Guy costume on, which by definition excludes wearing glasses (a fact to which I can attest from personal Halloween experience). *** let me drop you like a bomb, make me put your clothes back on [LE] This shows the effect on Juanita of his failure to respond: it hits her like a bomb; she takes it as a rejection (see JUST STARTED TALKING above). see you walkin to your car, the way your tears reflect the stars [LE] Crying, she leaves the Jeep. It's still nighttime, with the stars still out; but these are also the "stars" of the speed still in her system, the speed for which she's desperate ("shootin stars" [MV], "your stars are shootin up and down my arm" [SBackwards]; see DRUG SLANG above). "Her" car, as we'll see, doesn't belong to her --- she's in no shape to drive. Rather, it's the car that will turn out to be her *ride.* i'm not saying how cause it's not allowed but we're even now [LE] He doesn't intend to give up his progress by revealing who he is, and in fact doesn't, as we know from the phone calls still to come (see EYEPATCH GUY above). She's rejected him all summer long (see EAST VS MIDWEST above); now he's rejected her. They're even. she's takin off tomorrow says she's gonna start all over when she gets there [LE] Dawn's coming up again, and she's going to leave; where she goes, we'll find out after wrapping up the story of The LBI (see PERFUME COUNTER GIRL below). *** let this be a testament to every lightbulb filament that burnt itself out before it got turned on let this be a lesson learned for every single finger burned reachin out for something that was already gone [LE] In "before it got turned on" we have another subtle reference to the Narrator's inability to get it up when she comes on to him (see JUST STARTED TALKING above). The rest is testament to his disappointment and his failure, and to the fact that she's now gone.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 1, 2021 6:51:01 GMT -5
I should add one more note about
Sat in the back of the theater just drinking and talking [AE]
Nothing says that "back of the theater" has to refer specifically to the backseat in order for this to be an indirect allusion to a car scene. But I'm pretty sure the Jeep doesn't have a full back seat (check out Wrangler models of the late 80's early 90's), plus there's explicit evidence (coming up tomorrow) to the effect that the Narrator and Juanita are sitting in the driver's and passenger's seats, respectively. Just want to make sure to get the literal level nailed down first --- once that's solid, it'll be much easier to feel out the metaphoric details.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on Jun 1, 2021 6:40:34 GMT -5
Before anything else, apologies for the late post yesterday, it was a holiday here and I forgot it was Monday. No big deal, I'm sure, but I do want to avoid confusion and stay on schedule. Quick question here: With so many similarities between the car scenes in LP and THS, is there anything suggesting that "theater" being a metaphor for a car? I'm mostly thinking about the line from Almost Everything, about "sit in the back of theater just drinking and talking", since "drinking and talking" seems to be very close connected to the comedown of Juanita (and also the comedown in the THS story), but I also see how "listen up at the back of the theater, I think they really love one another" could be an euphemism for sex in the backseat of a car. I'm not sure if this holds up, and if the metaphor could possible extend to movies too. If I remember correctly, you interpret "all ages hardcore matinee shows" as the rape in the brewery bar, right? Most of the time, "theater" looks like another metaphor for "club" to me; the "listen to the back of the theater" line in particular has got to be primarily a dark joke about the Narrator's experience hearing Juanita yelling while she's getting fucked in the bathroom of the brewery bar. But, beyond even the usual disclaimer about Craig's aggressive ambiguities making both readings possible, in this case there really is some evidence for a car metaphor as well; the alternative Star Wars Hips lyrics have Talked straight through the drive-in movie [SWH alt lyrics] which seems pretty explicit. The huge scope of meaning carried by movies/videos/visions, projectionists/directors/actors, etc., makes it pretty likely for "theater" to be used in some pretty aggressive ways. And I guess the stuff about the chaperone telling The Narrator to leave also is set elsewhere than in a car, but it could also be consistend with Dwight telling The Narrator to get out of the car, so that he can begin his late night/early morning hardcore show with the (literal) sophmore. The Narrator is reduced to a spectator. I'd never even thought about the specific line When the chaperone said that it was time for me to leave [MN] as referring to the Frontage Road, but that too has got to be right. Excellent catch. As usual, this is more a random thought or digression than a real alternative way to read this stuff, but the latest chapters have made me curious. And the further we dive into these narratives, the smaller the geographical scope seems to get. Hold tight! The geographical world is about to get a little bigger (Thursday), then it's going to get a lot bigger (next week).
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on May 31, 2021 17:28:46 GMT -5
JUST STARTED TALKINGThe encounter starts out simple, with the two of them drinking to come down; but soon enough the Narrator remarks that he's "getting drunk and weird" [Emperor] and that "things got kinda strange" [CaAoC]. [*1]This weirdness comes on the heels of both drinking and "just started talking" [CaAoC]. What exactly did they talk about? ***From the Narrator's point of view, he's successfully picked Juanita up [JBS]; now he's trying to bond with her in conversation, to draw her out. That's part of what's going on in "baby we can just chill/ we could all be friends again" [Emperor] (in the wake of their violent fight, see UNDER WATER above); it's also what's happening in the third verse of Sublet: and i thank you, wanna say i'm sorry that i got your sublet and i lit her cigarette and she smoked and i made some progress we've all got our little secrets [Sublet] We know that he did make some progress, because Juanita is eager to keep talking to him afterward (as described in Bloomington, TPatP, and Mono; see EYEPATCH GUY above). There are lots of secrets in and around their talk, too, some his and some hers: the fact that the Eyepatch Guy is actually the Narrator; the fact that she's bored with the scene and wants to leave [CaAoC]; other things that we'll find out about later. At any rate, he has these goals for the conversation, and manages to advance them to some degree. ***A more interesting question is whether *Juanita* has goals for the conversation. On the one hand, like Holly hoping to get to California, she's hoping the Eyepatch Guy might be "the boy to take me away into fortune or fame" [CaAoC]; on the other hand, like Holly in the car after her resurrection (the Crucifixion Cruise), she wants him to hook her up with more speed. Her "taking" to him is consistent with both the one and the other; as they get closer to each other in the Jeep, he can't be sure if it's Juanita being genuinely responsive to him, or Katrina trying to engineer a transaction. [*2] This is the meaning of "cruised and accused of cruising" [CaAoC]: Juanita's been cruised by the Eyepatch Guy; he's unable to shake the suspicion that she's cruising him too. [*3]***How exactly does this play out? First, there's a lot of evidence (see below) that Juanita's "cruising" turns into a literal offer to fuck the Eyepatch Guy; The Langelos indicates specifically that, like Holly in the backseat trying to "put her mouth around a difficult question" [CC], she tries to blow him. [*4] And this is where things get weird: because, against everything the Narrator's done to get to this point, and unlike everyone else on the Scene, he declines the offer. Why does he decline, when the chance to fuck her again was his main motivation for following her back to the parties in the first place (see ROME and EAST VS MIDWEST above)? There's good reason (compare "I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere" [Citrus]) to imagine that he doesn't want to fuck her in Katrina mode, when he suspects that she's just trying to suck him off for drugs. But as it turns out, it's not so much that he doesn't *want* it like that, it's that he *can't* fuck her even if he wants to. *He can't get it up.* There's no shortage of explanations for his failure: her drug-seeking proposition isn't what he wants; he's already taken the handjob earlier (see COSTUME PARTY above); he's sick from drinking all night and coming down [Emperor, ALNT]. The fact remains that it's a failure, and that it has big repercussions. Let's start by reviewing the evidence for what happened, broken up loosely by song. ***1) The Gin And The Sour DefeatIn the same verse of TGatSD that describes the Narrator meeting Juanita during the bust and spiriting her away (see FIRST BUST above), we find these lines: little sister with your stereo sound crash at my place but you can't make a sound [TGatSD] We've already shown that Juanita's "stereo sound" refers to the noises she makes during sex (see STEREO SOUND above); "my place" is the Jeep in which the Narrator is living now (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above). What he's saying here means: you can come back to my car and "crash" [*5], *but we're not going to have sex.* Stronger evidence is found in the phrase "the gin and the sour defeat" itself. This is a reference to the 1991 Simpsons episode "War Of The Simpsons"; there, a booze-fueled party is highlighted by the fight of a drunk married couple, John and Gloria, in which Gloria says ( link): The implication is unambiguous: the Eyepatch Guy can't cut it, man-wise, either. ***2) The Pirate And The PenpalFrom the Narrator's point of view, the central fact of the encounter is his failure to perform; but Juanita interprets what's happened very differently. For her part, she feels physically rejected by the Eyepatch Guy, concludes somehow that she's not sexy enough to attract him, and begins to idealize what she thinks she can't have: you're fifteen and you're six feet tall you're flat-chested and you're angry about it don't wear those push-up pants to the football dance, you've got enough nicknames already i asked the postmaster, he said penpals really can't be going steady ... yeah so he's a criminal at least you know he loves you for your brain [TPatP] Two important notes about these lines, before getting to the main point: - Juanita isn't fifteen years old; like Holly when she died (and Jesse when she didn't), she's "roughly twenty years old" [CSongs], a little younger than the 24-year-old Narrator ("now you're 24" [DStraps]).[*6] "Fifteen" here refers to the "fifteen beers" [Hardware, Emperor] in her system at this moment (see BORED above); "six feet tall" refers to the companion fact that she's peaked way too early ("that didn't seem like fifteen beers" [Hardware]; "decreasingly high" [Viceburgh]), which is to say that she can't get as high as she got on that first night, like Alice "when she's ten feet tall" (see the famous lyrics to Go Ask Alice: link; and compare the "decreasingly high" THS Alice reference in "First it makes her feel tall, then it makes her feel small" [CiS]).
- Besides the drug-fueled sex party allusion in "football dance" (see DANCING, LISTED, and THE BEARS above), this reference to the American institution of a homecoming dance to kick off the high school football season at the beginning of the school year confirms that the scene is set on Labor Day weekend.
And to come to the main point: "postmaster" and "criminal" both refer to the Eyepatch Guy (who "puts his instructions in my mailbox" [Bloomington], see EYEPATCH GUY above); in both instances, what he says to Juanita is understood by her as a message of physical rejection: "penpals really can't be going steady"; "he loves you for your brain" [TPatP]. ***3) The LangelosIn looking at Hardware, we'd noted that the Narrator (see COSTUME PARTY above) We'd noted, too, that it was Juanita's attachment of herself to him while in costume that gave him the idea of adopting the Eyepatch Guy as a persistent role. But it's the final verse of The Langelos, which we've already identified as an account of a later bust (see TWO AT A TIME above), that points back to the Jeep Encounter as the moment when the role was really handed to him: walked real fast down the boulevard tourists taking pictures of the sidewalk stars and all those pretty boys with the sideways scars all stood at attention Never asked to be king of these rats this position it just kind of fell in my lap [Langelos] The "rats" are the gangsters' kid victims (see RATS & CATS above), whom the Eyepatch Guy will lead to their revenge in The Flex And The Buff Result (see WE ALL WENT DOWN below); the moment this authority was conferred was when Juanita fell in his lap to go down on him (pun on sexual "position"), and he declined. ***4) Bruce BenderDespite this physical rejection, Juanita does believe that he loves her ("at least you know he loves you for your brain" [TPatP]), and not only because they're "penpals" [TPatP]. The fact is that, while they didn't have sex, they did kiss: kissed you goodnight once or twice in my car i detest the midwest, but the east is a priest [BBender] The Narrator has followed Juanita here because the "midwest" is boring without her, but the "east is a priest": there's no sex happening there. We can now see that the "midwest" of Bruce Bender is not only related to, but strictly the same as, the "windmills" of Emperor (see EAST VS MIDWEST above): they're two different words used for the same image, framed by the Narrator in the same moment in the story: here among the windmills, baby we can just chill we could all be friends again [Emperor] We see too that the platonic character of "baby we can just chill/ we could all be friends again" [Emperor] is significant (compare THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above); the Narrator wants to persuade Juanita that it doesn't matter if sex isn't happening, that they can just be friends again. ***5) At Least Not TonightApart from the fact that it comes from the THS side of the equation, At Least Not Tonight is pretty much free of the narrative scaffolding we'd normally use to connect the lyrics to the story; but there's one line (in the voice of the THS Narrator, "sick" from coming down, see above) that really can't refer to anything other than this scene: So so sick that I won't even stiffen [ALNT] [*1] This strangeness is mentioned in the THS version of the car encounter too, nuanced by Holly's double-vision awareness that the person she's talking to is more than one person: "It felt strange but it was nice and peaceful and it really pleased me to be around so many people" [CatCT] (see COMMEMORATIVE PLATES above). [*2] The ambiguity of Juanita's motives here is directly comparable to the ambiguity of the Party Zero kiss: there, the Narrator was unable to distinguish her contrition from her sincerity (see CONTRITION and SINCERITY above); here, he can't tell whether her come-on is genuine or mercenary. [*3] One of my great frustrations in this investigation is that I know there's a legal phrase "[X]ed and accused of [X]ing" to which "Cruised And Accused Of Cruising" is an allusion, but I can't recall what it is, and no amount of internet searching can scare it up. I doubt we're missing much of importance by not having it; but if anyone is able to identify the phrase, please share. [*4] That she tries to go down on him now, during the Jeep Encounter at the end of The LBI, is demonstrated in one of the THS reflections of the event: Then she kicks off her moccasins. The buckskin always sucks me in [Epaulets] The "moccasins" and "buckskin" belong to Juanita's "indian" costume. [*5] The ONDCP document ( link) defines the particular sense of "crash" intended here (see comments on Juanita's "Tecate landing" [EC] in THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE above): Crash -- Sleep off effects of drugs [*6] We've already proposed (see COMMEMORATIVE PLATES above), and the Narrator's reference to himself "now you're 24" [DStraps] confirms, that "sophomores" [NC] must be metaphoric when applied to both kids; but Juanita appears to be literally the age of a college sophomore.
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on May 28, 2021 6:41:01 GMT -5
THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNESo the Eyepatch Guy and Juanita have slipped out of the party, past the cops, and have made their departure on foot through the woods of the Party Pit. Where do they disappear to? ***From TMS, we know that they were heading for the "subway," i.e. back to the cars that brought them to the party (see FIRST BUST above); Sublet informs us that they did in fact make it aboard the "subway" (see TWO AT A TIME above); JBS specifies that this destination is literally the Narrator's Jeep (see TWO AT A TIME above). So far so good. Separately from these accounts, TGatSD (recounting their flight from the party, see FIRST BUST above) tells us that the Eyepatch Guy invited her back to his place: little sister with your stereo sound crash at my place [TGatSD] while CaAoC confirms that they in fact made it back to his place and started drinking: we ended up back at my place, we mixed the ripple and the champagne [CaAoC] So where exactly is "[his] place"? We find clues to the answer in unexpected corners: 1) In the aftermath of her visit to "[his] place," Juanita is left with the impression that he doesn't have a home phone (we're in the era before cellphones): he always takes his calls at the megamall [Bloomington] 2) His home bar is stocked with hobo wine. The line we mixed the ripple and the champagne [CaAoC] refers to a joke about mixing Ripple and champagne to get "champipple" ( urbandictionary) from the 1973 "Superflyer" episode of Sanford And Son ( wikipedia); the point of the joke is that if you get your hands on some champagne, you can mix that, instead of ginger ale, with your Ripple to make a really high-class drink. Ripple, per urbandictionary ( link) is "globally recognized as the bum wine of bum wines." 3) At the time of his flight from the cops through the park (see FIRST BUST and TWO AT A TIME above), he's eating his meals in his car: 'Twenty-three' was a shot of straight frustration Flying down the pathways, he was dying in the bars He mostly ate all his meals in his car [TL] The conclusion is there for the drawing: the Narrator is living in his car now; "my place" [CaAoC] *is* the Jeep [BBender, JBS]. More confirmation of this to follow (see JUST STARTED TALKING below). ***The fact that Juanita doesn't recognize the Eyepatch Guy as the Narrator as soon as she sees the Jeep has a few important implications. 1) It means that Juanita hasn't seen the Jeep before. It's plausible (and we'll come back to this topic later, see RASTAFARI GUY below) that the Narrator has acquired it recently, since she broke up with him; not only does he no longer need a place to bring her back to, but by shedding the costs of apartment rental, he's in a better position to support his "hundred dollars a day" [SM] drug habit. 1a) The implication that he's moved out of his place and into his car shortly before Labor Day is consistent with September 1 being, by a significant margin, the statistically likeliest date for lease turnover in student/twentysomething neighborhoods in the US in general, and in the Twin Cities specifically ( link). 2) It means that the Narrator and Juanita have departed from their Return Parties practice and come to the party separately. This is consistent with the fact that she dumped him after he tried, abortively, to kill her (see UNDER WATER above); it can be presumed that she came with Dwight, as usual, and that the Narrator, being now definitively persona non grata, came on his own. 2a) The fact that Dwight hasn't appeared (and, as we'll see, won't appear) to "reclaim" Juanita indicates that he's one of the partygoers who's been detained by the cops. (We do know that Dwight is present at The LBI, because he recalls the party by that name in Manpark.) [*1] ***Fleeing the party, then, the Narrator and Juanita make it to his Jeep in the parking lot on the far end of the Party Pit, and climb in. The Narrator's goal is to get her out of there, but now his costume trips him up. On the one hand, Juanita's only talking to him because she doesn't know it's him; but it's also true that the Eyepatch Guy is a stranger, and while she's definitely intrigued by the persona, "she won't go to a second location" [Lanyards] with him ("never go to a second location [with a stranger]" was a safety tip launched into mainstream/pop culture by a 1991 Oprah interview: link). So they don't drive anywhere (see also LAZY EYE below); instead, the Narrator pulls out some cheap white wine and six-packs of clear beer that he's got stashed behind the seats, [*2] and (as described in CaAoC) they start drinking and talking. For future reference, we'll refer to this part of The LBI as the Jeep Encounter. To unpack what happens there, let's begin with the drinking. The kids aren't drinking for drinking's sake. Juanita's a mess after doing too much meth and peaking way too soon (see BORED and TWO AT A TIME above); the Narrator is using the alcohol to try to bring her back carefully to earth. Emperor, which as we've already seen focuses closely on the events of The LBI (see CHARLEMAGNE and BORED above), adds some color to his attempt to do this: your eyes lit up like fifteen beers ... up all night, i'm getting drunk and weird we've got clear beer, i think you're gonna like it here among the windmills, baby we can just chill we could all be friends again [Emperor] The distinction between "clear beer" and "beers" is emphatic: like "tallboy cans" [YGD, BBlues] in the THS world, "clear beer" unambiguously means low-alcohol lager, by contrast with "beers"=meth (see LISTED above). The Narrator is, in fact, trying to guide her through a controlled "Tecate landing" [EC]. The meaning of the Entitlement Crew pairing of "Tecate landing" with what was always obviously Mary's "Tequila takeoff" [EC] wasn't clear before this ( heregoes), but now it comes into focus as a reflection of Juanita's LP trajectory, and we realize that we have, in fact, seen this scenario in THS already: - here, we have the LP Narrator in the Jeep using beer/wine to try to recover the Juanita lost inside of drug fiend Katrina.
- there, we have Charlemagne in his car using wine to try to recover the Mary lost inside of drug fiend Holly (the operation referred to with "wandering the Sonoma" [MoC], "going through the program with me" [CatCT], "coming down" [CiS], "hard to slow down when you're picking up speed" [SK], and "detox dream" [HM]: heregoes [linked and following posts]).
So much for the drinking. On to the talking. [*1] We've already noted that Nassau Coliseum uses the story of the concert bust to retell the story of the raid on The LBI (see COSTUME PARTY above): in this framing, the "guy selling domestics/ [who] got himself busted/ didn't have a license/ couldn't be trusted" is evidently Dwight. [*2] The evidence for what they're drinking is surprisingly detailed; rather than let it derail us now, we'll come back to it later (see INDIAN FRINGES below).
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on May 27, 2021 8:35:30 GMT -5
TWO AT A TIMEBack again to the disappearance of Juanita with the Eyepatch Guy at the end of the party. Besides CaAoC and TLaDiLBI, there are two other important accounts of their departure that we want to look at before moving on. ***1) Jeep Beep SuiteThe first of these is the first verse of Jeep Beep Suite: driving down the street in my jeep givin beeps to all the people on the sidewalk listen to the loose talk, eye to the sky, ear to the mci everybody's talkin 'bout a woman that's a friend of mine, picked her up at the airport she said i just got back and i'm already bored [JBS] There's lots to connect here: [*1] - "my jeep": we've already linked the title of Bruce Bender with the Eyepatch Guy (see CHARLEMAGNE above), and anticipated the fact that the Narrator in the first verse of the song itself is addressing Juanita in the character of the Eyepatch Guy (for more detail, see LAZY EYE below). In that song, he drives a Jeep; here, he drives a Jeep also. It's the Eyepatch Guy who's speaking.
- "a woman that's a friend of mine, picked her up at the airport": the Eyepatch Guy picks up Juanita at the "airport," i.e. the Nice Nice qua brewery bar (see AIRPORT & LBI above).
- "she said i just got back and i'm already bored": all summer long the the kids have been losing ground to boredom; Juanita had hoped that a return to the brewery bar would let her recapture something of the high of that first night, but now they've just got back (the party was broken up not long after it began) and she's already come down from a disappointing peak despite taking something on the order of fifteen doses (see BORED above).
***2) SubletThe second account is in Sublet. Sublet is a fantastic and obscure song; we've had to come a long way to be able to push past the college-indie veneer and "oops, he meant the Parthenon" hurdles to do some real analysis. But we're finally here. The key to the song is that the Narrator is talking to Katrina ("you") about Juanita ("she"), who's still a suboccupant of the drug-addicted body that's become Katrina's space. The first verse is a description of the Narrator and Juanita at Party Zero: guess it all started in your apartment you were in europe, she was your sublet and i thought that she looked like an angel i put my mouth up against her halo [Sublet] - "guess it all started in your apartment": like "her southside hardwood floor apartment" [SGS] (see ON THE FLOOR: CARPET & HARDWOOD above), this "apartment" is the brewery bar. There are several reasons for the "apartment" framing (see CANDY'S ROOM below), but the main one here is that it serves as a pretext for the "sublet" metaphor. Everything started in the bar, with Party Zero.
- "you were in europe, she was your sublet": again, Juanita is described as Katrina's "sublet" because she's a suboccupant, not of the "apartment"=bar, but of the *body* now occupied by Katrina, like Mary somewhere inside the body occupied by Holly in THS (see KATRINA above). "Europe" is, again, the brewery bar (see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above.)
- "and i thought that she looked like an angel": it's Juanita the Narrator fell in love with, not Katrina.
- "i put my mouth up against her halo": he went down on Juanita early in Party Zero, before the birth of Katrina (see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above).
With the second verse we come to The LBI: after your party in front of your roommates we walked out the doorway and got on the subway we went two at a time through the turnstiles we went two at a time through the turnstile [Sublet] - "after your party": after The LBI was broken up; "your party" because it was her costume party (see COSTUME PARTY above).
- "in front of your roommates": in front of the gangsters of the Nice Nice (the "greasers" of "Greece"; see GEOGRAPHY: SELF-TITLED ALBUM above).
- "we walked out the doorway": this is the Eyepatch Guy disappearing on foot with Juanita; for "walked" compare "stepped out of the neon signs" [TLaDiLBI] and "we all started walking" [CaAoC].
- "and got on the subway": they're heading for the place where the partygoers' cars are parked (for "subway"=cars, see THE GREATER TRIP DOWNTOWN above); compare "slippin through the subway grates, and you're tryin to get underground" [TMS] of the kids fleeing the bust (see FIRST BUST above). More on this next (see THE RIPPLE AND THE CHAMPAGNE below).
- "we went two at a time through the turnstile": this line is a really tremendous bit of Craig Finn deception. You can hear it a hundred times and never hear anything but the description of a couple's romantic escapade, slipping through the subway turnstile together on a single fare. Only on stopping to examine the words closely do we realize that the expression "two at a time" is used of *multiple* pairs in succession (like the animals entering Noah's ark). There are *two* pairs here: the Narrator/Eyepatch Guy leading her, and Juanita/Katrina following him.
More Sublet coming up shortly. [*1] The second line is difficult and obscure, so I'm putting my handling of it in a footnote. Each of the three phrases listen to the loose talk, eye to the sky, ear to the mci [JBS] describes an act of vigilance (listening, looking, listening). The subject, in continuation from the first line ("in my jeep") is the Narrator. The third line suggests a conclusion that he's reached through this vigilance: everybody's talkin 'bout a woman that's a friend of mine [JBS] which means the three objects of his vigilance must add up to "everybody." Who exactly are they? a) First, a comparison of "eye to the sky" with The Langelos' can't you tell that these helicopters haunt me [Langelos] suggests that it refers to looking out for the cops who busted up The LBI, in analogy with the memorable helicopter scene from the then-recent 1990 film Goodfellas. (The Langelos line refers, in fact, to a similar flight after a later raid; see SECOND BUST below.) The Narrator and Juanita have escaped from the cops, so he can't *listen* to them; but he knows they're still after him and after Juanita, and he's still watching out for them. b) Second, "listen to the loose talk" appears to be symmetric with don't listen to the whispers of the kitchen knife, the bathtub and the rain [TPatP] in TPatP; this suggests that the "whispers" are the luring voices of the gangster dealers, inviting Juanita to the suicide of sex-and-drugs half-death (for "kitchen" see THE KITCHEN above; for "knife" see CRUCIFIXION above; for "bathtub" see BATHROOM STALL above; for "rain" compare "white rain", and see THE FOAM above). This reading appears to be confirmed by other examples: sex is just whispers and abdomens [BBender] The way the whispers bit like fangs in the last hour of the party [SN] Listen up closely to the lit tips of your cigarettes. Can't you hear the serpent hiss? Saying, sweet baby, suck on this [MM] c) Finally, "ear to the mci" refers to the phone company MCI Communications (which emerged as a major US telecom after the breakup of AT&T in 1984, and in 1993 launched the then-famous 1-800-COLLECT service for collect calling). All the phone calls (both real and metaphorical) in the Lifter Puller story are calls between Juanita and the Narrator, either in his own person or that of the Eyepatch Guy; the person on the other end of the "mci" call must be Juanita herself, who's presently in the Katrina state. In short, these expressions appear to refer to the (a) cops and (b) gangsters from whom he's trying to shield Juanita --- compare the evidence of Rental, describing a later episode in another car: tinted windows, no one can see you no one can get to us [Rental] and to (c) Juanita inside Katrina, with whom he's trying to connect over the "phone" --- compare, again, the evidence of Heavy Covenant: In the taxi to the airport ... Then right back at my phone to find a friend It seems a single body is a couple different people in this one life [HCovenant]
|
|
|
Post by skepticatfirst on May 27, 2021 8:25:44 GMT -5
I sometimes feel that stopping by this thread is the internet equivalent of walking up to some of your favourite musicians, only to say "I really liked that show, you guys were so good, thank you for doing this". I just don't know what more to say, haha. All good, man! The hard work is all done, now I'm just unrolling it. Good aha moments coming pretty much on a daily basis at this point, I hope.
|
|