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Post by skepticatfirst on May 4, 2021 7:47:50 GMT -5
LEAVINGThe ending of the party, after the kids wake from their stupor, is only alluded to in a few essential points, most of which are variant reports of the fact of waking up itself. But we can boil down what's known into a closing chapter. ***The first important point is that Juanita's memory of the assault is impaired (as noted in ROOFIES above, anterograde amnesia is a documented side effect of the roofies): i don't quite know what happened [ILtL] said you might remember pretty soon [PSunglasses] There's a shadow of this LP moment hanging over the opening of THS Banging Camp as well. Mary needs a review of history to learn the part of Holly for their return to the Skins ( heregoes), but there's a secondary suggestion that she herself doesn't remember the metal bar party, even if they've gotten over the trauma in the intervening years: Holly wore a string around her finger She said it helps her to remember all the nights that we got over [BCamp] ***The Narrator starts out HDaD by saying that he doesn't remember for sure what he was hit with: here's everything i remember last dance and somebody must've slipped me a sherman ... that's everything i remember [HDaD] But by the time we get to the end, after all the lines that follow, that final "that's everything I remember" is clearly ironic: he's ended up remembering everything, and remembering it in terrifying detail. This squares with what is already noted explicitly in PSunglasses, that his memory of events comes back to him, whereas Juanita's doesn't; which in turn leads to an important inference. Upthread (see ROOFIES above) we've said that the actual knockout drug in play is ambiguous, in that there are many allusions to spiked drinks, and many allusions to laced joints, and sometimes allusions to the two combined ("roofies in your jungle juice" [NN]). But the information about the Narrator and Juanita's very different amnesiac experiences suggests a particular solution: namely, that Juanita was hit with roofies in a drink, while the Narrator was, in actual fact, given a sherman. There are five strong reasons to believe that this is what happened. The strongest won't appear until we come to the last chapter of the LP story, but the other four are available to us now: - The Narrator states directly that "somebody must have slipped me a sherman" [HDaD].
- The roofied drinks are regularly associated with Juanita individually [SdS verse 1, RtF, NN, TMS], while in THS the margaritas are even more strongly framed as being particular to Mary alone.
- We have indications that Juanita stepped away from the Narrator before drinking the roofied drink ("I'm going to walk around and drink some more" [PP]; see WALK AROUND above).
- Again, Juanita experiences the anterograde amnesia covering a span of hours that's typical of roofies, while the Narrator's confusion is short-lived.
So the descriptions of the Narrator coming "up for a couple of drinks" [SdS], or Juanita looking "like Frampton" [LPvtEotE] with a sherman in her hand at breakfast, or the "roofies in your jungle juice" [NN] muddle, are all poetic license. At the literal level, Juanita drank a spiked drink, and the Narrator smoked a laced joint. ***Another standout characteristic of the aftermath of the party is the kids' ragged state. In Prescription Sunglasses, the Narrator describes himself as black and blue: i woke up, i was black and blue, hey girl what did we do? [PSunglasses] In fact, both of them are hurt; in Touch My Stuff he notes we did the black and the tans into the black and the blue [TMS] where "black and tans" [compare C&N, BCamp in THS] refers to the militia-leaning gangsters --- the kids "did" the gangsters, and in so doing got beaten up, and worse. We know that they have abrasions from the carpet and splinters from the hardwood floor (see ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES above). ***Several songs extend the final tally of injuries with detailed references to head wounds. The first of these is the description of Juanita waking up (see AIRPORT & LBI above) with a bloody mouth: and they all woke up at the airport in the arcade at the western concourse that's when she said that we should do this all over she wipes the blood from her mouth with her shoulder [TLaDiLBI] The Brokerdealer account of the "vision"/"fever dream" Lifter Puller story in If Not For Hipster Pictures describes both the Narrator and his female companion bleeding from the mouth like vampires: i came to in the nude in the cage in the zoo blood drippin from my mouth like i was some sort of dracula wrapped in tattered taffeta this is mid-America this is mid-America wrapped in tattered taffeta we are Minneapolis passed out in a party dress passed out in a party dress well hello miss Minneapolis [INFHP] This tattered vampire imagery is familiar from the THS story, too, for example in Navy Sheets: Sunday morning, sidewalks splattered Feverish in stylish tatters ... Can't get over what's transpired Left home virgins, came back vampires Belt it out like back scratch choirs We're either dead or really tired [NS] As a metaphor, the vampire unites the "half dead" theme with that of drug-seeking, see Back in Blackbeard: vampire fangs for bitin into cellophane bags [BiB] to form a nexus of images that in the THS world yields teeth dreams, needles like fangs, dealer Gideon in a cape, etc.; but it appears that the image of bleeding from the mouth after being gangraped is the original one on which the rest are built. This is further suggested by the "fish hook" metaphor [TMG, TMIT, HCamera, Magic Marker], per which drugs are the bait, and dicks are the hook: he had a red swimsuit and two eyes two miles apart looked just like a hammerhead shark with a hook in its mouth, he was dead in the yard [TMG] The above descriptions of the kids' tattered [NS, INFHP] and ripped [Viceburgh, TGatSD, PRock] clothes remind us in passing to link the Narrator's "red swimsuit" [TMG] with "your swimsuit gets ripped" [PRock], and to conclude that his torn underwear is bloodstained --- like the perizoma of crucified Christ (see CRUCIFIXION above), with the nuance that he got the sword in a different part of his side. The association of these mouth injuries with oral sex is further developed by the end of Back In Blackbeard (possibly in reference to the gangster chicks, see THE QUEUE below; but just as likely in reference to Juanita, in analogy with "your love leaves bright bruises" [GLS], at Party Zero; see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER and YOUR LAUGH above). and the papercut tongue from lickin on the centerfolds [BiB] ***There are other suggestions of the Narrator finding himself outside in the greenery with a head wound after the party, especially (in THS) in The Last Time That She Talked To Me: I can't even figure out whoever's in the party house. I'm out here on the front lawn with the head wound. [TLTtSTtM] Let's Get Incredible repeats the association of the "lawn," i.e. Swede Hollow park in front of the brewery (see THE EAST and DAWN above), with the kids' sexual activity at a long-running party prior to waking up: we groped on the green golf course lawn and we sped through the 7th straight dawn and we woke up in 7th street [LGI] This waking up in the park is, for the rest, consistent with the reference to the "yard" in the line from The Mezzanine Gypoff quoted above: with a hook in its mouth, he was dead in the yard [TMG] It's also consistent with a retreat from the brewery complex back along the same route by which it was normally entered, as described by OftC (see AIRPORT & LBI above): When there weren't any parties she'd park by the quarry Walk into the woods until she came to a clearing [OftC] ***How the kids got from the bar to the park below is not directly described, unless it's by "falling five flights of stairs" [PRock] (see BREWERY BAR: THE STAIRS above). But it seems that their departure began with a walk, bloodied and shaking, through the park back to the world: she's creepin out of the east end [ILtL] Walk on back [HaRRF]
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Post by skepticatfirst on May 3, 2021 20:10:40 GMT -5
Oh and I've got a shitload coming up about the taxi. Hang on till next Thursday, it's a good one: Google Maps, Street View, pictures of the Motel Mariposa, the whole works.
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Post by skepticatfirst on May 3, 2021 20:02:55 GMT -5
And I guess both the thing about the taxi, the party and the hardcore stuff, is the same stuff other parts of DJs, Rock Problems and even Hostile Mass revolves around. Hard Corey suggesting they leave the party rings different now, and we already know a lot about a couple leaving a party full of (either expclitily called, or implcitly refered to as) clever kids. So I still think the third and fourth verses of Hostile Mass (I'm copying them off the liner notes to make sure they're authoritative; love the Lifter-Puller-style all-lowercase lyrics) go together: they put the screws into charlemagne. he had a detox dream he saw christ in all his glory. charlemagne didn't feel any pain. but he's bleeding from the holes in his story. he [continuing right from where verse 3 left off] said: hey my name is corey. i'm really into hardcore. people call me hard corey. don't you hate these clever people and all these clever people parties [HM] In other words, Hard Corey is Charlemagne telling his story full of holes to the cops, in Gideon's voice (he's in Gideon's body now), exactly like in Hot Soft Light. This is right after the Crucifixion; when he says "all these ... parties" he means it; he's run the whole gamut of the parties, and now he's done with them. But you're right about the other two: MPADJs and Rock Problems are both about the same party, an earlier one, and one that's based on a much more concretely developed LP original. We'll get there pretty soon at this point. I've got just two more short posts wrapping up the details of Party Zero, and then I'll put up a summary of the whole thing, which I hope will do a good job of consolidating everything before we move on to the next chapter of the story. Back at it tomorrow.
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Post by skepticatfirst on May 3, 2021 10:01:08 GMT -5
SLIPS BACKWARDSBefore we leave Party Zero, and while we're fresh from taking a look at the backstory of Juanita's rejection of Dwight, let's collect the final bit of information we're given about the story *before* Party Zero takes place. ***One of the more far-out things Craig does in the THS lyrics is at the end of Most People Are DJs, where he tells the recreational-to-medical story in reverse order, *explicitly stating* that he's "working backwards": Working backwards from the doctor to the drugs From the packie to the taxi to the cabbie to the club [MPADJs] As it turns out, MPADJs isn't the first time he's done this; Slips Backwards --- which also announces its narrative ordering right in the title --- is an entire song built around the application of the same trick. We don't have quite enough of the story down yet to pick out all the details, or to rewind through all the "then ... then ... then" events of the second-to-last verse. But with what we do know, we can at least recognize the references to Party Zero in the first verse (see STEREO SOUND above): girl you know this party's just a compromise between these boardroom suits and your bedroom eyes ... nothin gets me down now, man it's gettin loud out i'm shaking in the downtown, here's a little shoutout, yeah [SBackwards] Here and in the following verses it seems clear that the Narrator is addressing Juanita directly, talking about things that presuppose their shared experience. But when we finally get to the last verse, we get something different: said that she liked hardcore, took her to a party kissed her down on lake street, didn't get her number kiss and trip and hang around [SBackwards] That "said that she liked hardcore" is a description of their meeting, before he "took her to [the] party" referred to in the opening line, i.e. Party Zero. It's only a fragment, but it tells us something essential about why they hit it off in the first place, and why the Narrator is so into her; she likes the music that he likes too.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 30, 2021 11:27:19 GMT -5
Not sure hurleybot is updating this list, but I just remembered the Sketchy Metal line And bless the beasts and the children and the water and the waiters [SM] which appears to refer to the 1971 move Bless The Beasts & Children ( wikipedia). It's true that the movie was based on a novel, but the novel is pretty obscure, especially for someone writing in the 2000's; looks like an allusion to the film to me.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 30, 2021 8:25:21 GMT -5
NIGHT CLUB DWIGHT Upthread (see MAGICIAN above) we identified Night Club Dwight as the one who gave the kids the roofies, and said we'd tie up the evidence for his actions, and the backstory behind them, later. What we've just learned about the financial details of the confrontation in the corner opens the door to that discussion. ***The YGD quote about the dealers taking $10 from the THS Narrator reads, in full: You gotta go with what got you there. I came with chipped teeth and some bleached blonde hair. You gotta make do with what they gave to you. They took ten bucks and my tennis shoes [YGD] As discussed in the Here Goes thread ( heregoes), "chipped teeth and some bleached blonde hair" is an allusion to Steve Randle and Ponyboy from the Outsiders, that is, to "greasers" [BBender]. The point of this verse is that the Narrator got a ride to the dance with a greaser dealer, [*1] and now he has to "dance" (see DANCING above) with him. This is one direct indication that the dealer in the corner is Night Club Dwight. ***What we've learned about the joke gives us a second perspective on this point, too. We know that the kiss of betrayal: a) takes place with the static-and-click interval at the end of one side of the mixtape in the background (see ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above); b) is followed shortly by the Narrator's joke (see THE JOKE above); which, taken together, mean that the joke, too, is delivered during the static-and-click interval. The song The Last Time That She Talked To Me refers to this in framing the Narrator's joke as a loser "at the buzzer" --- this "buzzer" isn't only a sports metaphor, it's also a literal reference to the static hissing/rattle of clicks in the background: Didn't realize when I scouted the location. That I was standing with her new man. And of course he made a joke about the jumpsuit When the band went into Caravan. If that's the kind of clever that gets her at the buzzer I guess that I was buzzing up the wrong tree [TLTtSTtM] It's obvious from context that the *winning* joke, when the contest came down to the buzzer, was the one told by her "new man" (Dwight, who promised to get her the highest). What, then, was Dwight's joke (beyond the surface-level reference to the outfit worn by Van Morrison singing Caravan in the Last Waltz)? The core of the joke has two parts: "the band" (as always, see YGD, CSTLN, HSL, etc.) is the Narrator; the "jumpsuit" is a prison jumpsuit (compare the prison rape joke about dropping the soap in the shower [Manpark, ASitS]). Dwight's joke is that the Narrator is about to become his "prison bitch." ***There are two ways to read the line about "scouted the location" [TLTtSTtM], but as usual with Craig it is possible that both are meant: - In the first reading, "scouting the location" refers to the moment in the corner by the window when the Narrator, taking in "the view from my baby's roof" [TGstSD], is "standing with," and confronted by, the dealer (see BREWERY BAR: THE CORNER above). In this reading, "going into Caravan" means that the gang is about to ride train on him.
- In the second reading, "scouting the location" refers to the moment when the Narrator first goes down to the brewery for the party. In this reading, "going into Caravan" means getting into Night Club Dwight's car for the ride (see THE RIDE above).
In the first reading, it could still be imagined that the dealer in the corner is one of the gangsters other than Dwight; but it is more likely, and in the second reading it is certain, that "her new man" refers to Night Club Dwight. ***Additional evidence that her "new man" is Night Club Dwight includes the following: - The allusion to "clever" is also an allusion to "clever ... Trevors" [BBlues], and Trevor=Dwight (see STRANDED above).
- Dwight is referred to as "her boyfriend" in KatKH ("the boy with the pipe in his face" is the same Dwight who "pulled out a pipe in the taxi" [ILtL]).
- Dwight refers to her as "my girl," who "last summer" was "your girl," in SH1999 (the song is told from Dwight's perspective).
That last point is key: in Space Humpin' $19.99, Dwight openly brags that he's got Juanita (Katrina) because of her enslavement to drugs --- an enslavement that he himself orchestrated by first slipping her a roofie, and then hooking her up with meth in the bathroom. It was, in fact, Dwight who said "Meet me back by the bathrooms" with the promise to get her the highest. ***And that's Dwight's motivation: it's not that he simply decides during the party to take advantage of Juanita; he's wanted Juanita for some time, and came to the party with a plan to do what he did. The song Nice Nice gives us a glimpse of their backstory: remember jenny back from i like the lights she said well i like you dwight but i don't like the pipe the things that you put in your pipe like your life now jenny missed her ride and she's takin off her tights in the back seat of some taxi we went from upstairs at the nice nice up to franklin up by 15th and jenny got dressed as they circled the block they did the secret knock and stuck their hands through the mail slot and one, two, three, four, that's the way that jenny scores [NN] Reread the first five lines: that "now" at the beginning of the fourth line sets up the contrast between Juanita *then*, and Juanita *now*: - *then*: there was a time when Dwight tried to pick her up, but she put him off; she liked him well enough, but she didn't like his crack addiction, and didn't think that dying for drugs was such a great idea.
- *now*: she herself is a drug fiend, desperately addicted to meth, and fucking him in the backseat of his car ("taxi") for a score.
That *then* is some time in the past, before Party Zero; *now* is after Party Zero (in the time of the Return Parties, as we'll see in a bit). In other words, Dwight set up the Party Zero rape (a date rape, though it wasn't his date) deliberately. Having been rejected by Juanita, he told her about the party: and the night of all that bloodshed i was kissin' on some crackhead who said he knew about a party he keeps it in his mouth in those crazy chipmunk cheeks i gave him fifty and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth [SSC] Then, having been asked by her (on her own and the Narrator's behalf) for a ride ("she came with some jack of diamonds" [DStraps]), he purposefully brought roofies along, planning to leverage his power to keep her from leaving into a chance to use them. Much of what happened beyond that was "just momentum from the Party Pit" [PP], so to speak (see THE EAST above); but it all snowballed out of Dwight's premeditation. ***The THS repackaging of important characteristics of Night Club Dwight into dealing, pimping, incompetent, but still sympathetic Charlemagne (along with a few stray characteristics --- 'Jack', the pipe, the asking to get you high --- into dealing, murdering, crazy, but still sympathetic Gideon) shouldn't fool us: the three are different characters, and unlike Charlemagne and Gideon, Night Club Dwight is presented as an evil one. He may be uncool, a "dwight" just like Charlemagne is a "trevor," but he's also physically imposing [*2] and more than capable of leveraging his muscle to threaten a roofie-weakened Narrator: gettin nice with night club dwight in the bathroom stall ... he's big and strong [CRoom] ***There's a more explicit testament to Dwight's viciousness, too. The final verse of No Future (another solo song that revisits the LP/THS material, see HALF DEAD above) shines what appears to be an instant of light on Dwight: Bedsheets for curtains One thing's for certain The devil's a person I met him at the Riverside Perkins [NF] We'll return to "bedsheets for curtains" later (see CANDY'S ROOM below); for now let's look at the Riverside Perkins. The Riverside Perkins was located at 901 27th Avenue South in Minneapolis ( link), on the block of 27th between 9th St and Franklin. If you ask Google Maps how to get from that location to the brewery in East St. Paul by car, it will suggest the following route: Here's a close-up of the starting-point, where the red X is the former Riverside Perkins: From this it's evident that the restaurant is an optimal place for a couple of kids coming from Uptown Minneapolis to rendezvous with a lift that will "run [them] across the river" [HDaD] to a party at the brewery (it's literally a straight shot from there down I-94 to the Mounds Blvd exit and Swede Hollow at the entrance to the Party Pit). This route is consistent with the "shadow" route described, half-literally, half-metaphorically, in The Sweet Part Of The City: It's a long way from Cedar-Riverside to Cedars-Sinai [TSPotC] The journey that "ended in the hospital" [HSL] ("Cedars-Sinai" refers to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles) started in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, at the Riverside Perkins. If in fact No Future is written from the point of view of a solo-song analogue to the LP Narrator (which seems to be the case), then the conclusion is clear: as indicated by the passage of Nice Nice quoted above, Dwight is Juanita's dealer-friend ("So we called up your guy, and when he comes we're gonna ask for a ride" [RP]), and their meetup at the Riverside Perkins for a lift to Party Zero was the first time the Narrator met him. Dwight's the devil in person. [*1] Compare THS, where "The punks, the skins, the greaser guys" [JaJ] identifies the Narrator as a punk, Gideon as a skinhead, and Charlemagne as a greaser; here too the Dwight/Charlemagne correspondence is preserved. [*2] It's also true that the literal meaning of "Charlemagne" is "big fella" ( link); while it's clearly safer to assume that Craig chose the name with a view to the "holy war" and other historical allusions in Emperor (see THE FIRST FIVE TRACKS above) only, and not to its etymological roots, the appearance of "Motel Mariposa" [HCovenant], with a certainly etymologically-mediated reference to Mary (Spanish "mariposa" from "Maria, posate!" meaning "Mary, alight!": wiktionary) makes me rethink that caution. (We'll come to the significance of the historical allusions soon; see CHARLEMAGNE below.)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 30, 2021 8:10:08 GMT -5
On the subject of Jawbreaker, I think their non-album single "Kiss the Bottle" would be something THS fans would really like. If they were painters, Jawbreaker would be the one who tends to use big, sweeping, romantic brushstrokes and THS would be one who tends to do very fine detail painting. I'm sold. No question but I get all the best music tips from this board, hands down.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 30, 2021 8:08:12 GMT -5
This might be the single best, tightest and most thrilling post you've made in these threads, and that says quite a lot. With the quoted part the absolute pinnacle of it. Thanks! I added footnote #4 the night before I posted, and your quote showed me that I forgot to renumber the following footnotes, so at least that part I screwed up :-) But yes, I was pretty happy when that all came together, especically when Heavy Covenant was released and "almost forty bucks" fit right in. I'm just in awe of how you've tied all these references to sums of money together. They always seemed to mean something, in all their specificness, and this just make a ton of sense. And even though I constantly have to ask myself if these post actually reveal the genius of Craig Finn, or if they're just so perfectly written that they lure me into believe in things that really isn't there, I'm 100% positive that references and overlapping metaphors/situations like these, simply can't be coincidental. There's just no way. Let me put it this way: if it's a lure into a trap, I hope that feeling of being trapped increases now with every post from here on out. :-) If you take any plot point in isolation, obviously having 200+ songs (LP/THS/Brokerdealer/solo) gives you a huge amount of material to work with, and you could imagine finding multiple interpretations that work for a one-off. But as we add more and more of the material from those 200+ songs to one single integrated picture, it gets harder and harder to imagine alternatives, which for me at least means that the thrill of seeing how each new piece fits in gets higher the farther we go. Still, one thing you didn't touch upon, which I guess could mean you don't consider it to be relevant here: Does this open up new ways of reading the 20s, 30s and so on in Positive Jam? I guess it's at least possible to read "woke up in the 20s" as a way of describing something happening umder the influence of ($20 worth of) drugs. Sorry, after you raised this question in your top #100 list, I meant to tackle it, and I forgot! The reason I didn't include it in the writeup is that, clearly, Positive Jam has a history-of-America rationale that totally works as a standalone thing. There has to be some explanation or justification for "new york city east side 20s" in Rental, because it's not at all obvious what the hell the Narrator is talking about. But the pattern that begins with "woke up in the 20s" is self-explanatory and easy to appreciate. Having said that ... it could be the case that Craig's meditation on *other* meanings of "twenties," "20s," etc. led him to think about using "20s" for the decade as well; he's often said that he'll get the first line or verse of a song right away out of things in his notebooks; you could imagine him putting "20s" together with "right before the crash" on the basis of things we've established as clear LP concepts upthread (see TWO TWENTIES and THE CRASH above), and then working out the whole song from there. I'm not saying this is what happened. I am saying that it strikes me as a plausible account of how the whole American history conceit of PJ might have come to be. And while we're at the five months thing, which is something I'm so damn curious about, I just have to mentioned that I listened to Half Dead And Dynamite yesterday, and for the first time it struck me that "the 4th and 14th incicent" might not refer to a street corner, but rather a date/month. The closest real life relevant date I could find, was Good Friday in the Easter of 1995, but I'm not sure if that checks out with all the references to the Sunday everything revolves around. I've been pretty occupoed thinking about April and September the past few weeks, cause there's a lot of stuff pointing towards that being the five months. April, because of Easter, bu also cause it's mentioned here and there ("First it's April, then it's August", "It got bad around March or April"), and there's lots of things pointing towards "back to school" being a theme, Jenny back on campus, even the stuff in the non-narrative Mission Viejo, so September it is. I've been trying to map things out from Labour Day (Cruised And Accused Of Crusing) without getting much wiser. Edit: Oh, yeah, and I almost forgot. That line in The Swish, who not only talks explicitly about something lasting till September, but also intriguingly gives an early preview of all the camera/movie set stuff going on in Open Door Policy. I've yet to piece together what's what (even though "the proof is in the photo shoot", so, yeah), but it's still a damn interesting line, after both this thread and the new record. If there were any doubt, I'm talking about "Moving pictures got us through to September/ they made a movie, it was all about me and you/ they made it half nude and half true". Not trying to jump ahead here, just needed to let that off my mind. I'm pretty sure that 4th and 14th doesn't refer to a date, mainly because I think I have a very complete argument for the dates and 4/14 doesn't figure anywhere. But we'll get to my rationale for the calendar pretty soon, and you can see what you think. Certainly the regular appearance of April in the lyrics is real and significant. Let me get on to today's post, and I'll add some more to the heap.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 29, 2021 8:05:22 GMT -5
TWO TWENTIESThe Narrator's joke: and we're having such a good time what's another twenty dollars [HDaD] clearly shows that Dwight demanded $20; but there are still questions about what exactly this means. What value did $20 represent? Was it the entire price that Dwight demanded, or is "another twenty" the remaining amount that the Narrator couldn't come up with after having already paid a part of the price? How much money --- none at all? or just not enough? --- did the Narrator have on his person? We've got enough information to piece together an answer, so let's review what we know. ***We're given not one, but two portraits of Juanita/Katrina conducting business in the bathroom stall with a multi-tier pricing scheme. The first appears in 4Dix: katrina got a little bit religious again she said lord grant me twenty, lord grant me ten because i can get by with ten if i can get a little bit from my friends walked into the bathroom and found the 4 horsemen wagering and arguing over which one gets to do you in [4Dix] Here, she starts by asking her drug dealer "savior" ("lord") to pay her $20; but she quickly backs off to $10, [*1] saying that she can get by with $10, even though it's not enough, if her friends in the gang will just be generous enough to throw in, quote, "a little bit," unquote (see A LITTLE BIT above), to make up the difference. The second is in TCMamG, where the first verse's list of the sexual "arts" [TCMamG] wraps up with a description of her offering her services in a slightly less desperate register: she's perched atop the pillow in her booth she says it's 20 if i'm supposed to tell the truth and for 40 then i'll wipe down all your wounds with scotch and soda [TCMamG] Here $20 is the minimum, the entry-level price for which she'll do the basic job without any flattering feedback; but for $40, she'll give you the whole works, like you're Jesus himself. This suggests that $40 is the full amount she's looking for; but $20 is still an amount she can do something with. ***The portrait of the LP "vision"/"fever dream" in Brokerdealer's If Not For Hipster Pictures includes the following sketch: it was shady strangers comin crawlin from the wreckage screamin i got what you need i got what you need it was the shady shady strangers comin crawlin from the wreckage screamin i got what you need you got forty bucks for me [INFHP] In a vacuum, "i got what you need you got forty bucks for me" might be understood either as the cry of a dealer offering drugs, or as the cry of an addicted kid offering sex, and in fact Craig might have engineered the line to work ambiguously for both. But the note of desperation, like Katrina's in 4Dix, indicates that it's the kids offering their services. The emphasis on "strangers," too, points to the addicts' alien souls, like alien Katrina in Juanita's body. So that's another data point suggesting that $40 is the principal amount being aimed at. ***Here the ONDCP document comes to our aid, with the following definition ( ondcp): Breakdown − $40 of crack cocaine that can be broken down into $20 packages We recognize the term as one prominently appropriated by Craig: okay i guess i'll pick it up right after the breakdown she walks out of the crowd, her vision's kinda cloudy [TLaDiLBI] Here both "breakdown" and "cloudy" ("cloud"=crack, see THE FOAM and LISTED above) are being used *both* in a conventional sense, *and* as drug slang. We'll come back to the literal events of this TLaDiLBI scene later; for now it's enough to recognize that this is Katrina, stumbling once more out of the "crowd" from whom she's just received a dose. The fact that the ONDCP definitions date originally from the 90's gives us confidence that the quoted prices are relevant to the LP world. Like the crack packaging described in the document, the LP meth dealers sold their wares in "breakdown" packaging: $40 dollars for a full dose, $20 for a half-dose. Compare (understanding the innuendo of "finger"=dick) the allusion to a breakdown in Hanover Camera: The manager asked if we'd break off a little package The singer put his finger in my mouth [HCamera] So the kids in TCMamG and INFHP ask for $40 because that's the price of a full dose. But when they're desperate, and they're frequently desperate, they'll take $20 so they can buy a half dose. And they'll even take $10, if there's hope that they'll still be able to make a deal for the difference. ***Juanita's willingness to provide services for $20 [TCMamG, 4Dix] is what's alluded to in "Space Humpin $19.99" (along with a reference to the Prince/1999 metaphor, but we'll get to that a little later). ***Before we come back to the implications for Party Zero, let's have a look at a completely different account: namely, the financial discussions detailed in Eureka. She had sixty eight bucks. She said she only had ten. Asset management. Checking all the balances. ... He went through her purse And he let her keep ten [Eureka] The "asset management" that's going on here includes cash, but not only cash. "Sixty-eight" is slang (see, with stronger than usual attestation, urbandictionary) for a bj, the sense being 'sixty nine, but the guy owes her one'. The real asset that the girl in Eureka has in her possession, along with the $10 that isn't enough to pay for anything without the help of a little bit from her "friends," is the offer of a blowjob. And in the end, that's what was transacted: she blew the guy, he gave her the drugs she wanted. In this case, he let her keep her $10, but that was an act of generosity, and he only did it after he verified that it was really her last $10. ***The pattern, then, is that $10 isn't enough even for half a dose; but if you have $10, you can throw another "asset" in the offer to bring it up to par. We see this, for example, in the solo song Balcony: I'll put your stuff out on the driveway You can get it when you walk back through the white light ... It costs ten dollars for a taxi. It costs a whole lot more to fall in love [Balcony] That "walk back through the white light" recalls Jenny "creepin back to the east end/ shot through with the sunlight" [NN, ILtL]; [*2] "ten dollars for a taxi," then, alludes to an arrangement like Dwight's taxi, in which Jenny tops off the $10 on her end of a drug bargain with a backseat fuck [NN, ILtL]. ***The "covenant" in Heavy Covenant refers to this same shortfall-covering bargain between the dealer and the "powerless" addict: [*3] That's a pretty heavy covenant To make with someone powerless He said I'll ask about that other stuff If you're still prepared to pay for it ... It's a pretty heavy covenant In the taxi to the airport ... Then I palmed him almost forty bucks Then I asked about the other stuff [HCovenant] The powerless person in the first verse quoted above (as opposed to "I" later, quoted for the price detail) is a girl asking the dealer to get her drugs ("that other stuff"; for the fact that it's a girl, see the reference to the taxi ride and the comparison to Mary's "you know I'm down to pay for it" [BCrosses]). She's reduced to offering the dealer sex, because while she needs a full dose, she can't come up with $40, only "almost" $40. ***This repeated emphasis on $10 plus "a whole lot more" [Balcony] as the powerless person's half of a desperate drug bargain is the last piece we're missing for our account of the Party Zero transaction. What happens, then, is this: After Juanita blows the gangsters in the bathroom stall, Dwight gives her her reward in the form of half a dose (one $20 half of a breakdown) of meth (see SMASHED HER HAND above. Juanita is a first time meth user, taking it via injection to the neck; Dwight doesn't give her a full dose). After shooting Juanita up, Dwight puts the plastic bag containing the other $20 half of the breakdown down on the sink so that he can fuck her against the mirror (see SMASHED HER HAND above). She sees the bag, and when the sex is done, she swipes it (observed by Dwight [*4]) and leaves the bathroom to go find the Narrator. Note that what she brings to the Narrator is, literally, "just a little bit" [JBS]; it's just half a dose. But that other half of the dose is also the other half of the apple of Eden [CatCT]. When Dwight finds the bag on the Narrator's person, he demands $20. The Narrator makes his "what's another twenty dollars" joke, but can only produce $10. So Dwight "took ten bucks and [his] tennis shoes" [YGD], where "tennis shoes" stands in for the "whole lot more" part of the deal ("no shoes and no pants/ And they ... called him Porky Pig" [HM]); in another telling, he "took [his] ten bucks and he went down the street" [CSummer]. [*5]And then the Narrator made up the difference. ***Unexpected confirmation of the exact measure of Juanita's "little bit" comes from the solo song Western Pier: The girls that live inside my heart Keep coming up the boulevard They roll up. They pledge their love And then they drive you halfway to a breakdown [Western Pier] We'll discover more reflections of the Lifter Puller story in the lyrics of Western Pier later on (see SHEPARD'S MANSION and CALENDAR: THIRD PASS below). Here, the descriptions of girls who "roll up," like Juanita stumbling over to the Narrator from the bathroom (see STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above), and "pledge their love," like Juanita giving him the Judas kiss (see THE KISS above), prepare us to recognize "halfway to a breakdown" as a reference to the half-a-breakdown gift of "a little bit" that she brought with her. ***There are several other details that square with this account. [*6] The reference to new york city east side 20's [Rental] is something that we can now parse in its entirety: "new york city" refers to The City, i.e. the brewery bar (see THE CITY above); "east side" refers to The East, i.e. the brewery bar (see THE EAST above); "20's" refer to the two $20 transactions at the turning point of Party Zero. [*7]***We've already said (see SHORT BY AN OUNCE above) that the following lines from Blackout Sam The General made a gesture of contrition. The law of averages says something's got to give [BSam] point to the Narrator needing to give something to make up for what Juanita took; but now we see that there's a literal arithmetic average in play here, since the two halves of a $40 breakdown are worth an average of 40/2 = $20. This is, literally, the confrontation from which the Narrator learns that "math is money and money is math" [MiM] (see SHORT BY AN OUNCE above). ***Finally, this analysis sheds light on both the title and the implicit narrative of 40 Bucks. (I'm not going to reproduce the whole song here, but for most of the lyrics and the Here Goes argument about Jesse attempting to make Charlemagne jealous, see: heregoes) In short: - Jesse's partying with gangsters (the "music scene"), and gets roofied ("whole lotta drinks and a little bit of sleight of hand"; "while she slept"; see A LITTLE BIT above).
- When she says "guys, let me cover this," what it means is *not* that she'll shell out dollars with which to pay for their drugs; what it means is that she'll *blow* someone to get the money to pay for their drugs.
- An act of anonymous sex is again indicated with "last night's conquest wasn't all that famous yet" (compare "I only bow down to the jet set/ Fame was so quick, we haven't met yet" [ABlues], and see ORIGINS OF SIGNATURES, DANCING, and THS REVISITED above).
- Charlemagne arrives in time to see her get $40 for blowing one of the gangsters. She uses the $40 to buy a breakdown from Charlemagne, and then gives it to the gangsters with whom she's partying, who are in fact the same suppliers from whom Charlemagne bought his merch in the first place.
- In other words, Jesse is imitating Holly, turning tricks and turning over the cash to Charlemagne, only she's not doing it in expectation of drugs (she's been off the speed since Charlemagne got her cleaned up: see "used to be a speed shooter" [SM] and heregoes), but to put on a show for Charlemagne, to make him fearful that she's *going* to start shooting speed again if he doesn't commit to her and take her away from the Scene.
- So the anonymous gangster who hit her with roofies and got the $40 blowjob, got his money back in the form of $40 worth of drugs --- "and then he left," just like the dealer who "took my ten bucks and he went down the street" [CSummer].
- The expression "two twenties from her dresser" both recalls the 20s of Party Zero, and suggests that her "dress" is where the money came from (compare "she was liftin her skirt just like a three dollar dancer" [Viceburgh]).
[*1] She's willing to bargain because, as Katrina, she's already high, and is "terrified of coming down" [ABlues]. [*2] Balcony takes place at "a party at that high-rise up on Harmon"; several details of the song, including the "high-rise" itself (compare Hamm's stockhouse #4) are reminiscent of Party Zero in the brewery bar. In particular, the lines I looked up to see the moon and I saw you and him out on the balcony It was the same thing that you did to me [Balcony] suggest that the narrator of the song sees his girl blowing the guy out on the balcony, in a way that recalls Juanita blowing the LP Narrator out on the rooftop outside the brewery bar (see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above). Offline, muzzleofbees pointed out to me that "Harmon" is the first name of Harmon Killebrew, who is referenced in Bloomington in connection with the "megamall" (on the site of the former Metropolitan Stadium where his record 520-ft home run is memorialized; wikipedia). This is an excellent catch, and the mall/stadium connection which it introduces (see NIGHTCLUBS above), adds weight to the shadow of the Nice Nice in the background. [*3] Note that "powerless" is the epithet of the jonesing addict not only in the literal sense of "helpless," but in the metaphorical sense of "lacking power," i.e. needing speed; compare "Lord grant me the power to stop these hands from shaking" [FFarm], "We were all powered up on some new upper drug" [MN], "power to the people makin money with their mouths" [Manpark], etc. [*4] The use of the verb "break off" in reference to breakdown drug packaging in Hanover Camera: The manager asked if we'd break off a little package The singer put his finger in my mouth [HCamera] strongly suggests that "someone saw her breaking off" at the end of The Last Time That She Talked To Me: In the kitchen there were signs that she was slipping Someone saw her breaking off the tape machine [TLTtSTtM] refers to Dwight's observation of her theft. The blowjob context isn't hard to see (for "kitchen" see THE KITCHEN, for "slipping" see SLIP AND TRIP above); it must be that "tape machine," like "smoke machine" [SdS], "fog machine" [SdS], "cig machine" [MTape], "candy machine" [TCMaMG], "washing machine" [SK], "bank machine" [TLTtSTtM], and "cash machine" [SdS] (see CASH MACHINE above), is here being substituted for the dealer whose merch she stole. [*5] We know the Narrator has less than $20 on his person at Party Zero; we have the evidence of YGD and CSummer to suggest that the amount in question is specifically $10. There is one other reference to the money in his pocket when he left home to join the Scene for the first time: i left with five bucks and i lived for five months like a queen [JBS] but "five bucks" here is evidently set up in parallel to "five months"; the amount is accurate only insofar as it falls short of $20 (compare Gideon in the parallel THS situation, heading down to the brewery bar for the first time: "went down with like fourteen bucks" [HM]). Note that we're meant to be (mis)led by "she said i just got back" [JBS] and the other references to Juanita as a "queen" on the same album [DStraps, LE] into imagining that this line is spoken by Juanita, but it's not; it's spoken by the Narrator, whose experience of Party Zero is followed by months of sexual exploitation at the Return Parties ("queen"=male homosexual: gdict). More on the "five months" later (see CALENDAR: FIRST PASS below). [*6] There's also one exception that *doesn't* square with it, namely gave him fifty and he kissed me, spit a little treat between my teeth i think we're starting to peak [SSC] Clearly this is an exception, but apart from that there are a couple of possible explanations for it. The simplest explanation is that "fifty" is used to leverage the force of rhyme within the already tight constraints of an extremely complicated image. (In the same way, despite much clearer evidence than this indicating that Dwight fucked Juanita from behind against the mirror, see SMASHED HER HAND above, the image here is built to leverage the force of the ATM-as-drug-"dispenser" [TSTux] idea instead; see CASH MACHINE above.) Alternatively, Green's Dictionary of Slang records the 1990's-era use of "fifty" to mean the services rendered by a prostitute ( gdict), by way of reference to the price of the sex act itself. This reading could be bolstered by Charlemagne's statement that Holly "left me fifty bucks" [MINTS] when she left turning tricks for him to run off with the "kid from california" [MINTS]. [*7] Compare also "Upper twenties, Seventh Avenue/ Just south of the Garden" [SPUD]: 7th Street [LGI, BBreathing] runs just south of Swede Hollow park in East St. Paul, next to the brewery; "Garden" recalls the framing of the shared 2x$20 breakdown as the apple of the Garden of Eden.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 29, 2021 7:42:24 GMT -5
We can continute this talk elsewhere, without disturbing the flow of the thread, but 24 Hour is a big step up from Bivouac, in my opinion. I love the one-two punch of Indictment and Boxcar, two very poppy punk songs who both adress what punk really is, what it means to be real, all draped in a very 90s context of indie vs sellout. The infamous The International Likes have played Boxcar several times, and it's always felt very appropriate to me, lyrics and idea wise. And Indictment hits even closer to home, when it comes to what I think about ideals, playing music and having fun. There's also a very strong link between those two songs, and another song relevant for Craig's lyrics: Doublewhiskeycokenoice. All of them is at its core about community and belonging, in some way. I can totally get that someone who reference D4 all the time, using them as a point of reference, dig what Blake Schwarzenbach writes and sings too. Damn, that's intriguing! I guess I should have dug further, but anyway I'm sold. Will definitely check it out. Super long post coming up, apologies in advance; there's lots of detail falling into place now.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 28, 2021 21:10:11 GMT -5
Man, this shit gets deep fast, doesn't it. I was wondering if the "fortress she called the family farm" was the same places as the "mansion on the mountain" Tim Yeah, I think so ... I think specifically that She brought me to a fortress, she called the family farm [FFarm] refers to the same "family" as He said large scale displacement is such a major modern tragedy That's why I instituted this open door policy Been thinking about kicking off some new kind of family I'm really glad that you're here [TPProcedure] for which see the Craig quote above (compare "displacement" with "displaced," and of course "open door policy" in both places). When the rich guy says "I'm really glad that you're here" he's talking about the family farm/fortress/mansion.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 28, 2021 21:03:46 GMT -5
Once again, I drop by with some random thoughts, fueled by this thread. Years ago I read that Craig mention Blake Schwarzenbach as one of his favourite lyricist. I didn't know who it was at the time, but I've since discovered Jawbreaker, and spent quite some time listening to 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. I'm not sure it will cast any light over anything mentioned in this thread, but I've found a few lines that at least could be influenced by Schwarzenbach. As usual, this doesn't have to mean anything, but it could possibly shed some light on some of the inspirations behind some of the images Craig uses. Said, "My chicks, they smoke these things." And handed you a Chesterfield King Held your hand and watched TV And traced the little lines along your palm (Chesterfield King) Off course, there's this connection between "chicks" and "Chesterfield". But there's also recognizable themes of the girl crazy about daytime TV, and the nod to palmistry (Girls Like Status). "The laughing right stands before me naked, unashamed It's for your own good It's going to hurt us more than it hurts you It hurts you
Don't it make you Don't it make you feel small? Don't it make you Don't it make you feel small? (Big) The mashup of laughing, nudity and someone getting hurt - but the "us" more than the "you". And of course, the "feeling small" thing. "They're colossoal" (Indictment) I know, it's just a word, but the phrasing and the place it occupies in the song, made me think of Plymouth Rock. So. yeah, not exactly mind-blowing, narrative-defining stuff. But take it as a reminder of what Craig thinks of Schwarzenbach, and if you haven't heard Jawbreaker, at least putting on 25 Hour Revenge Therapy. I was listening to Bivouac in the moment when I found the tennis court (upthread) on Street View! It's good, but I never moved on to 25 Hour Revenge Therapy, which I ought to do one of these days. Besides "chesterfield chicks," you're probably right about "feel small" and "colossal" --- the timing of the release of the album, the band's importance to Craig, and the relative rarity of those expressions makes that pretty likely in my opinion. Thanks for finding that quote ... there's a place where I should probably work that in later.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 28, 2021 10:01:50 GMT -5
THE JOKEBut what exactly is the thing that, per Hostile Mass, both is and really isn't funny (see YOUR LAUGH above)? According to Sherman City, it was something the Narrator did to make her laugh: i think i made juanita laugh [SCity] He "thinks" he made Juanita laugh in the same way that he's "pretty sure" they kissed: the girl in front of him is Katrina, but maybe he's made a connection with Juanita deep inside? [*1] Either way, he did something to get that reaction; what did he do? ***There's an LP "shadow" in Teenage Liberation that suggests the answer: And most of the jokes just kinda hung around and died [TL] This line alludes to a failed joke that, looked at through the lens of the LP world, strongly suggests a Party Zero context: "hung around" (see STRANDED above) "and died" (see HALF DEAD above). That jokes come in the form of words further suggests a reference to the same shadowed event in Stuck Between Stations: She said "You're pretty good with words, but words won't save your life" And they didn't, so he died [SBS] ***We've gained an important piece of new information since looking at these topics in the Here Goes thread, and that's the comedian/joke motif in You Did Good Kid. As indicated by our heavy quoting of it upthread (see A LITTLE BIT, CONTRITION, ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES, ON THE FLOOR: MUSIC, etc.), YDGK, despite being a THS song, reads like a straight-up account of Party Zero, and this applies to the opening verses too: when your low serotonin's got you brittle and glitchy and your friend from the null set isn't calling you back yet and your opening bombs and you're a few beats up ahead of the laugh track how you gonna talk about who's toxic or not? you gonna pick through the pills? you gonna call in the cops? the comedian claimed that he forgot all his props and the jokes don't really work well without em [YDGK] Pretending that this is a straight-up Lifter Puller song, so we don't have to talk about the "shadows" on every single line, what does this tell us? We start out with: - "low serotonin": the Narrator's got low serotonin from being hit with roofies (for medical evidence, see for example link; for plot evidence, see ROOFIES above).
- "your friend from the null set isn't calling you back yet": this is a reference to the Narrator "trying to get through" to Juanita in the bathroom, who "lets her voicemail take it" and won't "pick up her pager" or "pick up the phone/ return all these pages," etc. (see A MESSAGE above).
And then we're in the corner, with Dwight demanding payment for the drugs that Juanita stole for the Narrator: - "you gonna call in the cops?": these questions are all about options the Narrator doesn't have, since it's just him against naked force, "in the jungle" [RtF] beyond the laws of society:[*2] what's he supposed to do, call out Dwight's toxic behavior? ask him to count the pills Juanita brought him, to see that they're all still there? call the cops?
- "your opening bombs": he tries to talk his way out of it with words, and namely with a joke; but the joke bombs.
- "a few beats up ahead of the laugh track": Juanita "nitrous oxide laugh" is imminent, but the failure of the joke is still playing out.
- "forgot all his props": Dwight demands to be paid, but the Narrator "forgot all his props," that is, he doesn't have any money. With money, his fast talking is funny. Without money, it really ain't that funny. The joke falls flat[*3]; Juanita laughs her "nitrous oxide laugh"; Dwight asks the Narrator if he really wants to get his problem solved.
***We know that Dwight demands money that isn't there, but do we have any other information besides this logical inference to confirm the identification of the missing "props" with money? We do. First, the full context of the Teenage Liberation quote above specifies that the "comedy" is "underfunded": 'Seventeen' was an underfunded comedy About love and drugs and girls and immortality And most of the jokes just kinda hung around and died [TL] But more than this, we have the evidence of the actual joke itself. ***Upthread (see KATRINA above) we quoted about two-thirds of the lyrics from Half Dead And Dynamite, covering the roofies, Juanita/Katrina's emergence from the bathroom, and the gangrape. The remaining lines, sandwiched in between the two quoted sections, are: lip gloss now you're spinning like a thrill ride white cross now you're crumblin like a landslide and we're having such a good time what's another twenty dollars guess it all started with some guy who walks into the bar and always ends up fucked up in some barfly's car run across the river liquor lasts a little later rockin sloppy on the poppies, got your head beneath the table [HDaD] Picking this apart line by line: - "now" #1 ("lip gloss"): this describes the Narrator in the corner, first feeling the effects of Dwight's meth after Juanita brings it to him with the traitor kiss; "lip gloss" refers ambiguously to both the kiss and the standard LP cosmetics=drugs metaphor (see PHARMACY GOODS above).
- "now" #2 ("white cross"): this describes the consequence of "now" #1, with the Narrator getting gangraped; "white cross" refers ambiguously to the crucifixion, meth/amphetamine (see LISTED above), and the skinhead gangsters ("white crosses" [Knuckles]).
- "we're having such a good time, what's another twenty dollars?": this is the joke, the Narrator's response to Dwight's demand to be paid. It would be a pretty good way to defuse the situation, if he had twenty dollars to back it up with. But he doesn't.
- "guess it all started with some guy who walks into the bar": this reference to the routine joke opening, "a man walks into a bar," is the confirmation that the Narrator is trying to get a joke over.
- "and always ends up fucked up in some barfly's car": the joke has a fucked-up ending; the Narrator himself is the punchline.
- "run across the river liquor lasts a little later" refers to the ride in Dwight's car across the Mississippi to St. Paul and the brewery bar (see THE RIDE above).
- "rockin sloppy on the poppies, got your head beneath the table" refers to the Narrator fucked up on the hard stuff ("poppy"=heroin, "poppers"=meth; see LISTED above) and sucking dick.[*4]
***The Narrator needs $20.00 to pay Dwight, nail the joke, and walk away free. But he doesn't have it, and now he has to pay the "piper" [Manpark]. [*1] We've already taken note of a few apparently strong reflections of the LP story in the solo song Jester And June (see THE GIRLS and THE BEARS above); the note about "The clubs have all changed/ The buildings fell away" [J&J] appears to square with the demolition of stockhouse #4 and the brewery bar in 2011 (see BREWERY BAR: THE HISTORY above); the distraction that the kids experience hearing the "jangling" [J&J] (compare "jangling the keys" in BATHROOM STALL above) and blinded by "the flashlights in our eyes" [J&J] (see handling of video camera fill light MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above) appears to recall the terror of Party Zero as well. It's probable, then, that when the Narrator says "i think i made juanita laugh" [SCity], he's recalling what Jester And June describes as the early phase of the relationship, before "it got worse" [J&J], a time characterized by "Jester" being witty and "June" with him "laughing at jokes" [J&J]. [*2] Returning to Teenage Liberation, compare "on unsupervised vacations" [TL]; compare also "The law's long arm don't work down there" in the "basement bar" (the Hamm's Rathskeller; see ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS above) in Beer On The Bedstand. [*3] Compare the lines from A Snake In The Shower: Someone made a joke that seemed hopeful. About things that go bump in the night. At first it kind of picked up the party. Then it kinda ruined your life [ASitS] where "bump"=meth (see LISTED above); he almost gets the joke off the ground. But not quite. [*4] The connection of being broke and getting raped is also alluded to in the expression "strapped for cash" [TCMamG]; compare "strapped" with Craig's uses of "strap" as a term denoting violent sex (see PARTY ZERO above).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 28, 2021 9:42:36 GMT -5
Once again, I drop by with some random thoughts, fueled by this thread. There's some really interesting stuff here. I'm in a huge time crunch and need to get today's post up, but I promise to come back to this.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 27, 2021 21:34:58 GMT -5
If no one else wants to, I'll take a crack at it. There are probably a few ways to tunnel into this. ***The first thing I'd do is look at how "set up" is used by Craig in other songs. It looks like he leans on two different slang meanings (https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/ynulita): 1) 'set up' in the sense of 'prepare a disadvantaged situation for an intended target': Set up for the slaughter and shot in the shoulder [TS&tT] It sort of seems like one big set up [Trapper Avenue] 2) 'set up' in the sense of 'intoxicate': Now people give me sideways looks when we set up on the strand [New Friend Jesus] So, first, you're right that 'do drugs' is a meaning on the table, although it looks like it would have to be 'shoot up before bed' (meaning #2) rather than getting a kit ready for the morning. ***Having said that: when Craig tosses out a vague line like this in a crucial position in the song, I would bet money that there's a surprise double meaning to it. So in this case I would look for two readings, one for each of the two meanings above. ***The fact that the kids are speed shooters [SM, CiS, Smidge] accounts for part of the surprise: *they're shooting up so that they don't need to sleep.* ***There's a stretch of two weeks in both the LP and the THS stories when the kids stay on a rolling high so that they don't sleep: two weeks maybe we should sleep [TGatSD] He stayed up for 16 nights at a stretch, he was wrecked [TL] It's been fifteen days but it feels like forever [SShoes] My take (which I'm developing in some detail in the Alright Alright thread) is that the situation described in The Feelers belongs to this stretch of sleeplessness. In both stories, the two-week stretch comes before a final showdown at a big party. (For the THS story, this is the Crucifixion.) Which brings us to the second meaning; they're getting set up for the showdown, which, though it's still weeks away, is something they're going to have to get through before they can sleep again. ***Another cool thing to note about these last lines from The Feelers: Feels like now we're in this pretty deep We should get set up before we sleep [Feelers] is that they echo one in A Snake In The Shower: We dug in pretty deep and we were almost asleep Then someone put a brick through the window [ASitS] which is preceded by While we've been in between places we’ve mostly been staying At some house in the mountains her friend isn't using [ASitS] This "house in the mountains" [ASitS] *is* "the mansion up the mountain" [Feelers]. We're talking about the same episode in the story here. And for "in between places" compare Craig's note on The Prior Procedure (link music.apple.com/us/album/open-door-policy/1539020630):The "house in the mountains" is the place the rich guy owns. You can chase it down further, but let me stop there. Hope that gives you something in the direction of what you were looking for ...
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 27, 2021 8:21:36 GMT -5
YOUR LAUGHThe identification of Katrina's "birthday party" also lets us firmly situate another moment that's referred to several times in the lyrics: namely, the moment when Juanita laughs. ***The second verse of Lazy Eye runs: let me treat you like a queen, it could boost my self esteem dig your nails into my hands when i show you to my friends nitrous oxide laugh at your birthday bash right before you crashed she's takin off my glasses and i've only seen her once before without em [LE] These lines are written from the perspective of a later time; apart from a present-tense description of Juanita "takin off my glasses," the entirety of the verse is a retrospective on Party Zero. Evidence of this includes: - "let me treat you like a queen": compare "queen of spades" [DStraps] and "queen of the clubs" [HDaD], both linked to Party Zero (see KATRINA and BIRTHDAY PARTY above).
- "dig your nails into my hands": an allusion to the Party Zero crucifixion (see CRUCIFIXION above), with slang "nail"=joint (see LISTED above) a probable suggestion of the sherman the Narrator was hit with.
- "nitrous oxide laugh at your birthday bash right before you crashed": we've already linked the crash (see THE CRASH above) to Party Zero, now firmly identified with Juanita/Katrina's "birthday party" also (see BIRTHDAY PARTY above).
- "i've only seen her once before without em": when his glasses were knocked off (see VARIETIES OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT above) during the gang rape. (This is incidental confirmation that the Party Zero going-down-on-each-other episode was their first sexual encounter; see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above.)
That third line contains important new information. "Right before" the crash is the moment right after the kiss, the moment in which Juanita (now Katrina) stands beside Dwight as he threatens the Narrator in the corner ("she's standing right beside him somewhere" [DStraps], "the thief to the left of our Lord" [TV]). Her "nitrous oxide laugh," then, is the accompaniment to her high-as-hell "sideways smile" [TV] of betrayal (see SHORT BY AN OUNCE and THE CRASH above). ***The line following the "mountain song" allusion to Katrina's birthday (see KATRINA and BIRTHDAY PARTY above) in Sherman City provides further confirmation that Juanita's laugh occurs in this same "birthday party" context, when the Narrator is first taught to suck dick ("learned to dance"; see DANCING above): learned to dance to the mountain song out on that grass i think i made juanita laugh [SCity] ***Juanita's laugh casts LP "shadows" in the THS world as well. Girls Like Status alludes to the bruises (compare "I woke up, I was black and blue" [PSunglasses]) that follow on the heels of "[her]" laugh: Your laugh leaves laugh lines, your love leaves bright bruises [GLS] In the THS-world reading, "your love" refers to Mary's adoration of Charlemagne being scourged like Christ ( heregoes, heregoes); but in the LP world of which this world is a shadow, "your love" refers to Juanita's kiss of betrayal. The real agency in the latter reading makes for a much tighter and darker reading than the former. ***Similarly, there's the "funny" moment that's "really not that funny" mentioned in Hostile, Mass. This could certainly be imagined to refer to something in the THS world (say, a recollection of high school times in the Party Pit, see ASD; or a crack from Mary about Holly's death by drowning, see YLHF). But like the GLS line, it reads much more powerfully as a "shadow" of Juanita's laugh in the corner: Thinking things are funny when they really ain't that funny The kids on the corner they keep getting stung [HM] This reading is confirmed by the CitM link of "something funny" to "the place that all the money goes," shown upthread (see SHOT IN THE SHOULDER above) to be the needle-hole left when Dwight shoots up the Narrator in the corner with meth: There's something funny about the place that all the money goes [CitM] ***We've been at pains, both in Here Goes and in this thread, to show that Craig's character names are motivated by meaning. Given the importance of Juanita's laugh at the moment of her betrayal of the Narrator, I don't think it's too much to see "Sarah," the mysterious name appearing in Oaks (and several of the solo songs), as another handle for our alpha girl; see Genesis 21:6 ( link):
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 26, 2021 8:50:29 GMT -5
BIRTHDAY PARTYThe recognition of Juanita/Katrina as two aspects of the same person opens the door to resolving a number of other questions about the story. ***First, the fact that Juanita is born again as Katrina at Party Zero makes it her *birthday* party. The third verse of Double Straps ends with several allusions to this: and the punch is spiked, the soda's flat and your birthday cake and all your party hats your party lines and all your drinking games and everybody's smokin off the very same flame [DStraps] We've covered some of this already, but: - "the punch is spiked": refers to the roofied drinks (see ROOFIES above).
- "soda"=cocaine/heroin (see LISTED above).
- "cake"=meth (see LISTED above).
- "lines"=cocaine (see LISTED above).
- "hats"=LSD (see LISTED above).
- "drinking games": again, the roofied drinks.
- "everybody's smokin off the very same flame": self-evident drug reference.
Like the context of the lines before and after, these details are all recognizable features of the Party Zero scene; it's the birth of Katrina that makes them ascribable to "your birthday" [DStraps], "your party" [DStraps], etc. ***The star of this birthday party is naturally Juanita/Katrina, swanning out of the bathroom with gangster cum on her shoulders and in her hair (see CONTRITION and KATRINA above); but from the "half dead" death-inside-and-resurrection model proposed upthread (see HALF DEAD above), we should expect that the Narrator, too, was killed and born again by Dwight's injection of meth into his neck. The song Nice Nice confirms that this is in fact what happens: and we were born in these night clubs and you make those propositions with your sexy little shoulder shrugs [NN] It isn't just Juanita, but "we," the alpha couple, who died and were born again in the Nice Nice night clubs; the moments of her+his rebirth are clustered around Juanita's sexy spatter-shouldered entrance. ***This "birthday party" framing is hardly more than a quip in the LP scheme of things, but the seed planted here will bear fruit much later, when it's re-spun for THS purposes into the first-class episode of Holly's birthday party (recounted in MM, HF, SN, Weekenders; for timeline see heregoes). ***It's worth noting, too, that the day-of-Katrina's-birth framing has a parallel in the day-of-Juanita's-death framing --- the one in which the alpha girl's "I'm gonna walk around and drink some more" [PP] becomes, expressly, the "last time that she talked to me" [TLTtSTtM] (see WALK AROUND above).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 26, 2021 8:45:25 GMT -5
I think this is an excellent point, and one of the very best examples of how getting to know the Lifter Puller narrative sheds lots of light on the Hold Steady one too. It's so much easier to accept some of the twists in THS when it becomes clearer that it's a updated version of a system and idea that was allready on Craig's mind. I second that^. It's been tough to actively engage with this thread simply because it's so thorough and there's literally nothing of substance I could possibly add, but these posts have been fantastic. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the past two, specifically. There's a stunning amount of evidence for that "half dead" theory — it blew my mind. Knowing that, the "half your friends are dead" line is beyond genius. Thanks both for the vote of confidence. Repeatedly along the way I've had this same feeling, a breath of "oh ok, now I see how we got here" --- not by any means to doubt Craig's genius, but seeing that even he worked his way up to some of this stuff in steps makes it seem a lot less insane. Let me knock out today's post here quickly, gotta get back to work ...
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 26, 2021 8:39:13 GMT -5
Since the Stations of the Cross are usually arranged as paintings that you contemplate, it seems possible such lines like the one in The Last Time That She Talked To Me about telling the curator to emphasize the tape machine could be related. It's possible he's framing the image like one of the paintings of the Stations to be contemplated. (And, going out further on a limb, the song/songs are the accompanying prayers and reflections?) It also makes me think the many references in Thrashing Through the Passion to paintings that might be references the Stations.
I can't recall all the lines right now off the top of my head, but there's the one about the thief to the left of my lord.
From wikipedia's list of the traditional 14 stations, there is this one:
11. Jesus promises his kingdom to the repentant thief That would make the thrashing line an inversion of the traditional station, emphasizing the unrepentant thief rather than the repentant one. There's a lot that would have to be pulled together to make this work, but that picture (with the thief to the left of our Lord, more about that coming up in the thread) is definitely being compared to Christ between the thieves on Golgotha (Luke 23:33ff.: link), so that's a start. (The gospel doesn't strictly say that the one on the left is the unrepentant one (and the other versions don't even have an unrepentant one), so I don't know if that's the angle to lean on, but in any event this is certainly the scene.) Don't have time to look it up right now, but Charlemagne being scourged "with the motorcycle chains" refers to another of the events that's one of the Stations of the Cross, I suppose? Gotta think about others ...
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 25, 2021 19:41:46 GMT -5
ON THE FLOOR: VISIONS***The "stuck between stations" image, then, is based not only on "stuck" as in "stabbed," "stuck" as in "penetrated," "stuck" as in "injected," and "stuck" as in "stranded" (see PARTY ZERO, STRANDED, SHOT IN THE SHOULDER, and THE CENTER, above), but also specifically on the "between stations" hissing, static, and clicking heard in the interval between the two sides of the mixtape. [*7] Another possible layer of meaning for stuck between stations could be stuck between Stations of the Cross.
Stations of the Cross (from Wikipedia) :
The Stations of the Cross or the Way of the Cross, also known as the Way of Sorrows or the Via Crucis, refers to a series of images depicting Jesus Christ on the day of his crucifixion and accompanying prayers. The stations grew out of imitations of Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem which is believed to be the actual path Jesus walked to Mount Calvary. The objective of the stations is to help the Christian faithful to make a spiritual pilgrimage through contemplation of the Passion of Christ. ...
Commonly, a series of 14 images will be arranged in numbered order along a path and the faithful travel from image to image, in order, stopping at each station to say the selected prayers and reflections. This will be done individually or in a procession most commonly during Lent, especially on Good Friday, in a spirit of reparation for the sufferings and insults that Jesus endured during his passion.[4][5]
The style, form, and placement of the stations vary widely. The typical stations are small plaques with reliefs or paintings placed around a church nave. Modern minimalist stations can be simple crosses with a numeral in the centre.[4][6] Occasionally the faithful might say the stations of the cross without there being any image, such as when the pope leads the stations of the cross around the Colosseum in Rome on Good Friday.
I got kind of stuck myself this weekend and owe a few responses to the above posts, which I haven't had time to get to. But I did want to get this one out there --- Craig has a joke about this subject in Separate Vacations: Via Dolorosa it started with mimosas it ended with relations Mr. Minnesota stuck her between stations walked her through the passion went back to his cabin [SV] Obviously, it would be in keeping for Craig to have more than a joke built in here, but I'm not sure I can say with confidence what it would be. Separate Vacations has always been a strange mix of seemingly-recognizable details and things that seem clearly unrelated to anything else in other songs. When the LP story is fully laid out there'll be more to work with in terms of how SV might relate to the story, and maybe that's a good idea. Already, though, lines like "started with mimosas" sound awfully familiar (the analogy with "tequila takeoff" is unlikely to be accidental). Who would Mr. Minnesota be, if not our Narrator? If Charlemagne is the blue blood dude and Holly his "daughter," when did "he tried to sell me his daughter" happen? Obviously we could come up with scenarios based on this, but you'd want to see a lot of cross-confirming material in other songs, and the cross-confirming material that we do find seems to be telling another story (Charlemagne and the Narrator becoming friends long before Charlemagne starting pimping out Holly, for example). There are a bunch of difficulties like this in the song, so I've tended to just leave it on the side. Doesn't mean there isn't something interesting here though, if it can be made to fit with everything else (the hard part).
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 23, 2021 7:53:27 GMT -5
KATRINAIn concrete illustration of the effects of half-death of the soul, we have Holly's statement in Stevie Nix: I was half dead then I got born again I got lost in all the lights but it was okay in the end [SN] In other words, losing one's soul in the drugs ("lights"=meth, see LISTED above) doesn't mean a death of the spirit and that's the end of it; that death of the spirit is followed by the birth of a new spirit, like the THS Narrator being born again as the "new kid" (see HALF DEAD above), or Juanita emerging resurrected from the bathroom (see STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above). So who replaces dead Juanita on the inside? Who's actually *born* when she comes stumbling out "high as hell and born again"? ***Half Dead And Dynamite provides the answer to that question. First it sets the Party Zero stage with the roofies and the gang rape (the Narrator is the gangsters' beast of burden; it's his coal mine that's getting worked): here's everything i remember last dance and somebody must've slipped me a sherman bar band, now theyre busting out the "Beast of Burden" and they're "Working in a Coal Mine" drippin wet with white wine cooler [HDaD] then describes the moment of Juanita's emergence from the bathroom, reborn: in walks the queen of the clubs five deep in her foam dance thugs [HDaD] The "queen of the clubs" *is* the "queen of spades" Juanita; she's "five deep in her foam dance thugs," that is, she's the fifth figure stumbling in amid her four gangsters from the stall (see BATHROOM STALL above). The description continues: dripping wet with hair care drowning in designer drugs she says hey my name's katrina but my friends call me special k they did the "green eyed lady" right into the "lay lady lay" and it was cool by your swimming pool and we were dripping wet with pink zinc oxide and she came onto the patio and we were slipping on the frozen mudslides that's everything i remember [HDaD] Katrina's got gangster cum in her hair like Juanita's got it on her shoulders (see VARIETIES OF PHYSICAL ASSAULT above), not because she's *like* Juanita, but because she *is* Juanita, in the sense of being the occupant of Juanita's body. ***We've already observed (see DRUG LANDSCAPE and LACED SUBSTANCES above) the formal parallel established between Juanita and Katrina on the one hand, and harmless intoxicants and knockout drugs on the other: Juanita : Katrina :: J : K :: Marijuana : Ketamine :: innocent stuff : knockout drugs It's in the shift from the harmless to the vicious stuff that innocent Juanita dies in spirit, to be replaced by drug fiend Katrina. ***This also rounds out our understanding of the Sherman City reference to Donovan's song "There Is A Mountain": learned to dance to the mountain song out on that grass [SCity] It's not only the name "Juanita" that Craig took from Donovan's lyrics (2004 Cloak and Dagger interview: link), but also the idea of the emergence of a different inner person under the influence of drugs. Describing the power (from his perspective) for revelation and self-actualization latent in marijuana, Donovan says ( link): The caterpillar sheds his skin to find a butterfly within But in Craig's version of this emergence, the grass is spiked (see LACED SUBSTANCES above); Katrina, the butterfly within, is a pure stranger. ***For the stranger inside, compare the description, in the solo song Terrified Eyes, of a female character with addiction problems: He hates how Shannon talks about herself Like she's a whole separate person [TEyes] ***The question remains, as it does for all of Craig's characters: why "Katrina" and not some other name? We know that "Juanita" is a marijuana reference; we know that he was looking for a more insidious drug reference for the name of her second spirit (see LACED SUBSTANCES above). But even if we allow that "K" (Ketamine) in parallel to "J" (marijuana) was an obvious solution to that constraint, what accounts for "Katrina" in preference to the dozens of other K-names out there? The answer appears to be that it's linked to Craig's use of "waves"=crack as a drug metaphor (see LISTED and THE FOAM above) and to the band Katrina And The Waves, whose claim to fame, the monster 1985 hit "Walking On Sunshine" ( wikipedia), carries equally druggy resonance in Craig's lexicon ("sunshine"=LSD; see LISTED above). There are three immediate pieces of evidence for this (we'll come to a fourth later, when working through the closing chapters of the story; see INVITED below). ***The first is that the name "Katrina and the Waves" is directly cued by "Katrina and the _____" in the song title Katrina And The K-Hole. ***The second is found in the THS Narrator's eulogy for Mary in Multitude Of Casualties, after she's died to be resurrected as Holly, just as Juanita has died to be resurrected as Katrina: We were looking around for something that just died We heard the deacon's hopeful eulogy At least in dying you don't have to deal with New wave for a second time [MoC] There's a joke here about the sorry state of music at the time The Hold Steady was formed: in answer to a 2005 MAGNET interview question about why people responded so well to Almost Killed Me, Craig said ( link): But there's also a meaning with respect to the narrative: Katrina And The Waves were a representative New Wave band ( wikipedia); the rebirth of speed-seeking Holly in the now-soulless body of Mary is characterized as the rebirth of New Wave, because it's a reflection of the birth of speed-seeking Katrina in the now-soulless body of Juanita. The "wave" is the heavy stuff ("if you want to be saved all it takes is a wave" [Oaks]; see LISTED and THE FOAM above). ***The third piece of evidence, apropos of Katrina And The Waves' "Walking On Sunshine," is in the solo song Dennis And Billy: The pain went away, but the pills they just stayed The way it washed over, it was warm like the sunshine Billy felt filled up with the bright shining lights Just for a moment, he wasn't anxious or nervous [DaB] Here "sunshine"=LSD is described in the same terms as the "wave" (=crack) of foam rolling in in Roaming The Foam, and is compared to "lights"=meth (again, for drug terms see LISTED and THE FOAM above). ***A final thing that's impressive to see is how the parallels between Katrina and Holly are capable, in Craig's hands, of developing new dimensions *retroactively* in response to opportunity. That 1976's Hurricane Holly ( wikipedia) is linked to Holly ("they named her for a storm" [HJ]) isn't in doubt, because of the precision with which the dates and details all line up ( link); but it is a very minor, even obscure, event after which to name a character. Not so Hurricane Katrina, whose "crash into [New Orleans'] harbor" [HJ] in August 2005 made it what is still the most devastating hurricane in American history. It's plain in retrospect that it was this storm, appearing years after the close of the Lifter Puller saga and the main body of THS plot development, that first suggested the hurricane motif to Craig, which led to his fortuitous discovery of Hurricane Holly, which in turn led to his formulation of "Hurricane Jesse" for Heaven Is Whenever in 2010. ***One of the hardest-to-accept conclusions of the Here Goes thread was its claim about characters switching bodies and souls, starting with Holly being resurrected in Mary's body at the THS crucifixion. I still believe that the completeness, coherence, and balance of that account is enough to make it satisfying for anyone who's willing to work through the evidence and argument for it; but there's no denying that a major suspension of disbelief is required even to entertain it in the first place. Not so the LP story of Katrina in Juanita's body, whose relative simplicity and straightforward flesh/spirit symmetry makes it much easier to understand and to accept. Ideally, this point will do a lot to help frame the "outlandishness" of the THS narrative as an plausible elaboration of ideas already present in the LP story. We'll see more of these simplifying "genetic" explanations as we progress.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 22, 2021 12:23:47 GMT -5
HALF DEADThe crucifixion of Charlemagne in Swede Hollow is a genuine "murder mystery" [CiS], in which someone is really killed by a real knife. The fact that it's Gideon's soul in Charlemagne's body that dies ( heregoes) complicates the narrative, but doesn't change the fact that there's a physical stabbing and a physical death invloved. The LP crucifixion, by contrast, involves a metaphorical killing. But Craig has in mind a technical sense in which it too is a "murder" [SSC, LQ] on the same pattern as the THS one. ***One clear description of this technical framing is found in the solo song No Future (one of the solo songs that still openly deals in LP/THS themes, even if the narrative is different). Looking backward, the speaker in this song says: I've been reading about the Calvary The crucifixion still gets to me I guess Golgotha means the mount of execution [NF] Evidently this isn't a literal "execution," since the speaker is still alive. Yet we're told that that's what the meaning of the "crucifixion" comes down to. How exactly is it an "execution," then? I suppose you thought that I'd be shaken up I suppose you thought I'd be gushing blood Not true I only died on the inside And I suppose you thought that I'd be taken out Back behind one of those bars downtown Not true I'm still alive on the outside [NF] The references to "gushing blood" (compare MPADJs, HM, YS, BCrosses) and "back behind one of those bars downtown" (compare SN, Ambassador) clearly, and graphically, recall the THS account of the crucifixion. But even if this "execution" didn't happen in the leaving-a-body-behind THS sense, there *was* a technical sense in which it *did* happen: I only died on the inside ... I'm still alive on the outside [NF] On the model proposed here, there are two ways to live, and two ways to die: (1) on the outside, in the body; (2) on the inside, in the soul. The two are independent; like the speaker in the song, you can be alive on the outside and dead on the inside at the same time. ***The same idea is presented twice, once from each side of the equation, in the solo song Wild Animals: Man alive and the spirit put to death in the flesh [WA] Surviving in spirit, put to death in the flesh [WA] Here again there are two ways to be alive, and two ways to die: (1) on the outside, in the flesh; (2) on the inside, in the spirit. Again, the two are independent; in the first line, the speaker is alive on the outside (flesh), but dead on the inside (spirit); in the second, he's alive on the inside (spirit), but dead on the outside (flesh). ***These lines are set up to sound like figures of speech, but we already know that inside-vs-outside execution is taken *literally* for the purposes of the THS story, in which Mary, Holly, Charlemagne, Gideon, and the Narrator are all split into inside and outside, each with an independent mortality (for evidence and discussion see basically the entire back half of the Here Goes thread): - Holly's outside dies in the river, but her inside is resurrected in Mary's outside at the crucifixion.
- Mary's inside dies after the Judas kiss, and is replaced with Holly's resurrected inside.
- Charlemagne's outside dies when Gideon switches their bodies and stabs himself on the water tower, but his inside lives on in Gideon's body.
- Gideon's inside dies when he stabs himself in Charlemagne's body, but his outside lives on inhabited by Charlemagne's inside.
- the Narrator's inside "dies" when he becomes the "new kid" [BCrosses, MPADJs] and is jumped into the Skins again.
***Again, what happens in the twofold Party Zero crucifixion is simpler: Juanita and the Narrator are killed on the outside by the rape, and on the inside by the shot of meth. [*1] But it's not both at the same time; it's now one, now the other, following the vicious cycle we've described repeatedly (see THE FOAM, ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES, etc. above): when they've come down from the drugs, they're themselves in spirit, but have lost their bodies in the horror of the rape; when they're high, they get their bodies back, but have lost their souls to the drugs. [*2]***So the kids are perpetually "half dead," described together and separately as having "lived and died," and having "almost died": half dead and dynamite [HDaD] to live and die in lbi [TLaDiLBI] and she found something she likes, and she's alright but she almost died [TLaDiLBI] and i still ain't died, or have i? [BiB] The same expressions (with the addition of "almost killed") are familiar from THS as well, but it's worth collecting them (along with two throw-ins from Brokerdealer) all in one place to establish beyond doubt that being "half dead" is really a deliberate concept: now half the kids are dead [TDOLLD] Hey New York City ... you gotta give me back my body [GMBMB] The '80s almost killed me, let's not recall them quite so fondly [PJ] We got killed [Swish] And it's hard to hold it steady when half your friends are dead already [Knuckles] And the first four didn't really die, I just lied [Knuckles] Cause the last guy didn't really die, I just lied [Knuckles] Killer parties almost killed me [KP] It said "Jesus lived and died for all your sins" [YLHF] I was half dead then I got born again [SN] If she wants to stop on by, tell her that I almost died [AHfA] When it's over, the halves that "made it" [PSunglasses] mourn the halves that "didn't make it" [SCity]: and outside the club is where we spill our drinks in memory of all those guys that didn't make it till the dawn [SCity] We poured it on the floor and we made love to the interstates [PJ] + Like a hawk out on the highways We were looking around for something that just died [MoC] ***There are of course also many references to the characters' deaths that *don't* explicitly allude to their inside/outside split in both LP [TMG, RfLB, RTF, LPvtEotE, LQ, etc.] and THS [HF, BBlues, CatCT, CSunrise, TL, BCrosses, GoaH, etc.], but it's not necessary to review these now that the larger framing is worked out. The only one I'll call out for special mention is in Our Whole Lives: Tonight we're gonna have a really good time But I want to go to heaven on the day I die Gonna make like a preemptive strike Hit the 5:30 mass early Saturday night [OWL] The first-order meaning here is self-evident. The young THS-Narrator goes to early Mass before prom to ask forgiveness ahead of time for the sin he's hoping to commit; he wants to keep it cool with God and go to heaven when he dies, but he's also really hoping to get laid. But now that we know about the Party Zero origin of the going-down-on-each-other prom night encounter (see SUCKING OFF EACH OTHER above), we understand the second line in a much darker sense: the *LP* Narrator's moment in heaven with Juanita *does* actually turn out to happen *on the day he dies.* This is a first-rate example of an LP "shadow" (see LP SHADOWS above) on the THS story, with the entire early Mass episode of OWL functioning as a setup for the double meaning in this line. [*1] That Juanita is killed (in spirit) by the meth injection is a self-evident precondition of her resurrection in the bathroom (see STUMBLING & RESURRECTION above). [*2] This is the other sense of "separation Sunday," that the kids in spirit have departed from their bodies. Compare also the detailed portrait in the Brokerdealer song Give Me Back My Body.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 22, 2021 12:13:53 GMT -5
I still get a little creepy breaking-the-fourth-wall feeling of the "tell the curator" part. And the entire song, for all it's sedated weirdness, seem more and more... I don't know, important? Explicit? The song has got a lot of heavy material in it, that's for sure. About "tell the curator," I don't know what to make of that, either. It's one of those weird lines that he's obviously gone out of his way to frame in a particular way, and I could propose readings that are plausible, including some weird breaking-the-fourth-wall takes; but without some kind of confirming take from elsewhere it would be hard for me to feel confident about them. Maybe we'll find out --- with ODP there've been a number of new lyrics that have provided just this kind of confirmation for older ones, and it's bound to happen again, as long as they keep making music. :-)
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 22, 2021 12:06:31 GMT -5
I need to take all this stuff in, but the thing about the mixtape and the autoreverse is just so damn exciting. I think I've mentioned this in a short passing before, but have you re-worked the idea about "mountain" lately? I know in Here Goes, the mountain stuff was associated with being high (Rocky Mountain, Colorado, a lot more). But I've been thinking about wheter some (or all) references to mountains could simply be another way of talking about the brewery bar. *It's up in the sky, almost literal in name *It's a place you get high, in more than one sense *The mansion is connected to mountains ("the mansion on the mountain top) Then, there's this thing about Hamm's located on Payne Avenue, which also is the name of at least a couple of mountains. One in New York, one in Canada. I wouldn't know if any of these mountain tops are particulary famous or anything, but it seems like one of those double meanings who's not a total coincidence. It would at least put a new spin to "woke up in the Colorado pines", lots of Going On A Hike ("try to reach the peak of euphoric heights", and the entire hiking in the mountains trope) and some Lifter Puller stuff too ("Learned to dance to The Mountain Song out on that grass (the rooftop?)). Forgive me if we've been through this before, but I had to get it out of my system. Now, back to reading the latest post If I remember correctly Skeptic might disagree with my reading on this, but here's a quote from an article about the brewery: "The family did so well that they built themselves a mansion behind the brewery, a Queen Anne style mansion. Behind the brewery today there are still stairs that lead from behind the Keg Wash House up the hill, though an arsonist destroyed the house itself in 1954." (link to the article) I think that's another tie between the brewery and hills/mansions/mountains, so I completely agree with your interpretation of that. It would also allow for an alternate explanation of the cabin on heaven hill, which is definitely more than a Husker Du reference (although I think that line was tied to Jesse in Here Goes). As with all of these things, a double meaning is very much a possibility; but, with the caveat that I might be wrong, I don't think that "mountain" refers to the brewery bar as a physical location, whether because of its elevation or otherwise. A primary piece of evidence for this is in fact Shepard's "mansion on the mountain top" itself, which I'm pretty confident refers to a different real-world location in the Twin Cities. More Street View travel coming up ... You bring up a good topic with the "cabin on heaven hill," and we should come back to this --- you're right that it's based on the mansion on the mountain top, and it's also probably true that it's located in St. Paul, but we should talk about that after we've laid the groundwork with Shepard's mansion. Which we'll do in a few weeks.
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Post by skepticatfirst on Apr 21, 2021 9:51:22 GMT -5
CRUCIFIXIONWe know that the THS story is built around the two core incidents of the metal bar party on the one hand, and Charlemagne's crucifixion on the other. What's striking then about the YDGK passage we looked at above (see ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES above): the drifters in the kitchen were thrashing through the passion boys, let's try to keep it on the carpet you wouldn't be so impressed with the sunrise if it wasn't for the darkness [YDGK] is the unambiguous allusion to Christ's Crucfixion in "the passion," when this is clearly a description of the assault in the metal bar, not Charlemagne's crucifixion in Swede Hollow. We've noticed suggestions of this before, for example in "dusted in the dark up in penetration park ... punctured ... plowed" [YLHF], where "punctured" in reference to the knife in Christ's side is associated with being "dusted" with PCP (see ROOFIES above); but the YDGK passage is especially graphic. What accounts for the 'crucifixion' framing being applied to multiple THS episodes? The answer is rooted in the same thing we saw with the "movies" motif earlier (see MAGAZINES & VIDEOS above): there's a single underlying LP event, a Party Zero crucifixion, that's being repurposed more than once for THS retelling. So let's look at the Party Zero crucifixion. ***It was always a little surprising that the THS "crucifixion" metaphor was built around the wound in Jesus' side ("sword in his side" [BCrosses, compare Brokerdealer MCIGOaCT], "knife" [OftC, NS, SShoes], "burned a hole in me eventually" [A&H], etc.) rather than the more commonly accounted elements of the cross and the nails in the hands. You could explain that by pointing out that it's literally about Charlemagne getting stabbed, but the literal layer is so complicated that this doesn't really amount to a simplification. The Party Zero background clarifies all of this. As we wrote upthread in SHOT IN THE SHOULDER: which gets us straight to the point: 1) There's a single Party Zero violation with two linked materializations: the meth injection, and the rape. 2) Both puncture (shot) and penetration (rape) are treated in metaphor as stabbings. 3) Add to this stabbing (a) the traitor kiss and (b) being almost-killed (compare "dead once already" [MPADJs]), and we have the crucifixion. We've taken note of several lines about stabbings upthread (MiM, YHLF, Craig's note about LQ; see PARTY ZERO, STRANDED, and THE CENTER above), but want now to bring the essential ones together with some commentary. ***The Gin And The Sour Defeat characterizes the stabbing in terms of both sex and drugs: the bright lights always pick me up the knife fights always pin me down [TGatSD] Here "lights"=meth (see LISTED above), while "knife fights" is a reference to getting raped, confirmed by "pin me down" (compare "pinned down" [PP], see ROOFIES above), where "me" is the Narrator. ***Same thing in Candy's Room: baby ain't you heard about the night club called the nice nice they got the dry ice and the knife fights on every other wednesday night [CR] Here again "ice"=meth (see LISTED above), and "knife fights"=gangrape. ***Same thing in Let's Get Incredible: and the rags you stuffed into your stab wounds [LGI] Here "rags"=place where drugs are concealed (see SHOES AND SOCKS above), while "stab wounds"=trauma from being raped. This line is exactly analogous to "applyin cream on our abrasions" [LDoL], "went straight for the bathroom soap/ tried to make ourselves clean" [JBS], etc.: they describe the assault victims' recourse to drugs in order to deal with the trauma of the rape, which in turn leads to more sexual exploitation, and so on around the vicious cycle (see THE FOAM and ON THE FLOOR: INJURIES above). ***The Langelos adds further connecting detail: all those pretty boys with the sideways scars [Langelos] Like "the sword in his side," "sideways scars" on the "pretty boys" is suggestive of homosexual rape, as well as the crucifixion of Christ. In recalling the moment of Juanita's betrayal in the corner ("she stumbled up sideways" [LiaL]; see STUMBLING & RESURRECTION and SHORT BY AN OUNCE above), "sideways" also directs some of the blame her way; compare "i've got scars enough/ from the night i hit your moving truck" [Emperor]. ***Lifter Puller vs the End of the Evening uses the verb "nailed," with "nail"=joint (see LISTED above) suggesting the agency of a laced sherman, to connect the rape to other aspects of Christ's crucifixion: and i'm nailed to the nightlife like christ on the cross ... before the trash got crucified, they loaded up on those curly fries and pontius pilate was just night club dwight in disguise [LPvtEotE] Note here the use of "trash" in echo of the Narrator as "Twin Cities trash bin" [MPADJs, RP] in the kitchen corner. We already had strong indications (see MAGICIAN above) that Dwight was the one who hit the Narrator and Juanita with roofies; the identification of Dwight with Pontius Pilate, sentencing the Narrator to crucifixion, adds force to that reading. ***A final item of note is the way the Records & Tapes account of the THS crucifixion goes out of its way to link the sword of execution (compare "sword in his side") to the floor (see ON THE FLOOR: CARPET & HARDWOOD above): Falling on the floor just like Saul on his sword [R&T] As with so many other things, the sprawling complexity of the THS crucifixion comes into much tighter focus when seen from the perspective of its Party Zero origin.
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