The thing that drew me wasn't the A Plot, which is a truly interesting story of a bunch of Baltimore criminals trying to daffiest defense of all time. The B Plot is what got my attention, specifically the way that the B Plot was the history of the Sovereign Citizens movement. It pulls a lot of threads together, even to the point of the cranks who think that the layout of Washington D.C. is a secret message from the Masons.
Read it. It's kind of long, but it's illuminating in that it ties Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Posse Commitatus movement together. It's also illuminating in how it explains the rise of militias and how ol' Sheriff Joe out in Maricopa County thinks that he can arrest the President and all the county sheriffs who think they can stop the feds from taking away their guns.
The Sons of Bill-ification of The Gaslight Anthem continues apace. That, for anyone wondering, is an actual sentence in English. I know, I’m as surprised as you are.
It turns out that I kinda-sorta have to eat my words from the post I wrote about The Gaslight Anthem a couple weeks ago. I compared them to Sons of Bill but gave them a markdown because they couldn’t seem to shift into a lower gear like Sons of Bill can. I apparently had not made it all the way to the end of Handwritten then, because there’s this song called “National Anthem.” Here, listen to it:
I could have used that song about four years ago. The first verse pretty much defines a certain period of my life. And the second verse…
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Now everybody lately is living up in space Flying through transmissions on invisible airwaves With everything discovered Just waiting to be known What’s left for god to teach from his throne? And who will forgive us when he’s gone?
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I like music. I’ve defined my life, or at least parts of my life, through and by music. I like writing about music. I also tend to really, really despise people who write about music. I don’t think people should write about music.
This is awkward.
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In order to get me into the proper mood for this post I set up a randomized playlist consisting of exactly six albums: Sons of Bills’ A Far Cry From Freedom, My Hometown, and Sirens and The Gaslight Anthems’ American Slang, The ’59 Sound, and Handwritten.
The randomizer just went from Gaslight’s “National Anthem” to SoB’s “Roll on Jordan.” This is how “Roll on Jordan” starts:
Yeah, in this sad world we live in The government bought all the trains And there’s a lot of lonely people And they’re all flying aeroplanes And they think they’re closer to heaven Lord but that is far from true You gotta take that ride on the River of Jordan See what a boy from Galilee can do
The second verse of “National Anthem” makes me think of the first verse of “Roll on Jordan.”
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The problem with people who write about music is that they generally write about music to let you know how much smarter they are than you. Or they write about music to let you know that they’re not nearly as dumb as you think they are. It kind of seems to depend on what they’re writing about. If it’s some indie band like, say, Sons of Bill or The Gaslight Anthem it’s probably the former. If it’s Taylor Swift it’s probably the latter.[1]
Here’s the thing: I don’t care what you think of me for writing about Sons of Bill. I like them. Don’t get me wrong, I want you to like them, too. I think that they’re one of the ten best bands in the world right now, and that’s a list that includes the reconstituted Soundgarden, two different Scott Lucas projects, Mike Doughty, Flogging Molly, Matt Nathanson, and Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers. I also genuinely don’t give a shit whether you actually do like them or not. Music, like all art, is completely subjective. My appreciation for a particular band or song shouldn’t have any impact on your appreciation of the same thing. It doesn’t fucking matter.
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I took Amy to exactly one concert. It was a Local H show at Durty Nellie’s in Palatine. I couldn’t go to Local H shows or listen to Local H songs without thinking about that night for a long time after we stopped talking. That included the time I saw Local H in Houston and Fort Worth when I was in Texas and desperate for anything that reminded me of home.
It sucked. It’s weird, too, the memories that come from moments like that. I was driving my old Cavalier at the time and I’d just installed a new Clarion head unit. It was a pretty high-end unit and I was proud of it. As I drove home from the Local H show she pointed out that the colors weren’t lined up correctly with the rest of the dials on the dash of the car.
At least she knew to be happy for me about the fact that I had a cool head unit. I’d installed a pretty cool Pioneer unit in an earlier car and the girl I was dating at the time had only pointed out that my radio presets were suspiciously secular in their musical content. I think I’d told Amy that story. So she might have gotten the message already.
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I was at a party a couple weeks ago. While I was there I met this really cute blonde. I walked her back to her car, which required a detour to my car for…y’know…reasons. It was really cold, so I turned the car on to get the heater going. I reached over to turn the sound down on the stereo and she told me to leave it on. She wanted to know what I was listening to.
As it turns out it was one of many CDs I’ve been obsessively working on of late. I keep trying to come up with the greatest randomized driving compilation. It contained everything that mattered: Veruca Salt, Letters to Cleo, Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers, Soundgarden, Pearl Jam, Local H, Scott Lucas & the Married Men, Sons of Bill, Garbage, the Wheeler Brothers, and Mike Doughty.
I reached over to turn the music off and she said she wanted to hear what I was listening to. She didn't seem to realize that she might as well have asked to see me naked.
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Right after I moved back from Texas I went on a couple dates with this one woman. After the first date I was walking back to my car with Sons of Bills’ “So Much for the Blues” running through my head. It was right then that I knew it wouldn’t work out.
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That’s the thing about writing about music. I don’t have to justify any of it to anyone else. If you, as the reader of this blog post, listen to Sons of Bill and don’t like them it doesn’t negate my memories. If you, as the reader of this blog post, listen to Sons of Bill and love them it doesn’t make me like them more.
Too many people who write about music don’t get that, though. They think that your appreciation levels somehow impact their lives. It doesn’t. Or, at least, it shouldn’t. If you’re the sort of person who thinks that the opinions of others somehow invalidates or reinforces yours then, well, you’re just a sad, pathetic person.
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The thing about music, though, is that you can’t get more personal than a song. You also can’t get less personal than a song. I love Sons of Bill. I’m coming to love Gaslight Anthem. I want you to love both bands as well.
Please. Go. Love them both. But know that if you decide that they’re not your cup of tea that I just don’t care.
Why should I? You don’t think about the same things that I think about when you hear them, after all.
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[1]For the record, Taylor Swift sucks. It’s not because her music is trite and overcommercialized, which it is. It’s not because she seems to think that fucking other people over to fuel her next number 1 hit is a good business decision, which seems to be the case. It’s because SHE CAN’T FUCKING SING. That’s my main gripe. Listen to her sing live. She doesn’t get within the same ZIP code as the appropriate key.
Do you feel like your life is missing something? Have you been wondering if there’s something more than that which you’ve been able to experience and understand up until now? Then I have good news for you. There is more out there. You just need to open yourself up to the possibility that there’s something bigger. You need to admit that you’re not capable of making it on your own. Then you need to accept The Dollyrots into your heart.
Will The Dollyrots fix all your ills? Probably not. Chances are that they won’t find you a job. Chances are better that they won’t cure you of cancer or herpes or that annoying cold you’ve had for the last couple days. They probably also won’t get you a date on Friday night. So you might ask yourself, “Why should I accept The Dollyrots into my heart instead of, say, accepting tequila into my stomach?” I’m glad you asked. The answer is “hangovers.”
The Dollyrots will not give you a hangover. Tequila most likely will. Ergo, tomorrow you’ll be better off with The Dollyrots. Tonight you might be better off with tequila, but, well, have you considered that it’s your short-sightedness that has caused you to become the unemployed, single, cancer-riddled sad sack you are today? Think about it. No, YOU think about it. But not too long. Especially about that cancer-riddled part, since I don’t think that tequila causes cancer and if you think I’m saying that you’ll probably decide I don’t know anything. And tequila manufacturers might sue me for libel or something.
Anyway, where were we? Oh, yeah, you were accepting The Dollyrots into your heart. Why were you doing that, again? Because the Dollyrots are awesome, that’s why. In fact, if you listen closely, chances are that you’ll hear The Dollyrots tell you that they’re awesome. See if you can catch the undercurrent in their song “Because I’m Awesome:”
The Dollyrots kinda-sorta jumped onto my radar last week and have basically clubbed my head against the various bits of solid equipment that make up said radar. I’m okay with that. I didn’t really need my head, anyway. I mean, I didn’t need it as much as I needed The Dollyrots to take up residence in my heart. That might be a long-term problem, though, since my heart is where my blood used to be and I feel like that might be detrimental.
Eh. What’re ya gonna do?
I came of age during the reign of grunge. I also came of age during the golden age of pop punk. As such, while Soundgarden is the most important fucking band in the world to me, Green Day and the various Green Day clones that followed had more than a bit of influence on my determination of what makes music good. For anyone who’s been paying attention to this here blog I’ve also recently spent quite a bit of time making sure that ‘90s riot grrl rock got added to its proper place in my own personal pantheon.
Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, then, I was in the exact perfect state of mind to get my mind completely and totally fucking blown by The Dollyrots. How do I explain The Dollyrots, then? Basically, they’re what would happen if Kay Hanley of Letters to Cleo and Emma Stone had a daughter[1] and raised their love child on a steady diet of Green Day’s Dookie, Sugarcult’s Start Static[2], Letters to Cleo’s Go!, Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You, and No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom.[3]
Seriously. Kelly Ogden of The Dollyrots sings like a hybrid of Kay Hanley and Louise Post of Veruca Salt. This is more of the Kay Hanley side:
This is more of the Louise Post side (weirdly, every single live YouTube video of the band seems to have the same washed-out lead vocals. This is the best example I could find. What're ya gonna do?):
Also, in case you’re wondering, Kelly O plays the bass and is the lead singer, which puts her in the same, rarified, air as Lemmy Kilmeister of Motorhead. So, fuck yeah?
And, um, yeah, that was just an excuse to put up another YouTube video. What’re ya gonna do about it?
Either way, The Dollyrots: go get you some. Your life will be better. Even if you have cancer-herpes. I don’t know what those are, but I’m guessing they’re cold sores that break out all over your body every couple weeks and never, ever go away until they kill you. Don’t get cancer-herpes.
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Because I can, here’s some music cited in the above post:
Veruca Salt’s “Volcano Girls.” Because I can, that’s why.
Japanese people. So hilarious. Amirite, guys?
Green Day used to be fun. Then they went all political and Billy Joe started wearing eyeliner. I miss the old days of songs about masturbation and, um, other songs about masturbation. And albums named after slang for poop and dumb people. The ‘90s, man. The ‘90s. They were the best.
Let’s all move to Portland. This has nothing to do with anything, but I need the dream of the ‘90s to be alive right now. I just do. Also, I totally want to move to Portland. Except I fear that the reality will be more annoying hipster than musical numbers and that hot girl with the glasses and the blue bandana. Who's probably actually an annoying hipster.
Every time I see this video I realize that there will come a time when we’re as embarrassed by the fashion of the ‘90s as people who came of age in the ‘80s are about leg warmers and pastels. I mean, all the dudes in the video are dressed like Charlie Sheen from Two and a Half Men. And the whole cutoff jean shorts + leggings thing Kay Hanley was rocking? Yeah…no.
Oh my god, you guys. THIS WAS A THING. I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THIS BEING A THING!
Okay, then, I think that the Flaming Lips just broke my brain. The lesson, as always, is that following YouTube links is dangerous.
Eh. Have some No Doubt. Nothing bad comes from that, right?
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[1]Which is totally possible according to science. It’s why the feminazis want to get rid of men, after all. Consider yourselves warned, men who would otherwise be procreating with Emma Stone or Kay Hanley.
[2]This is technically impossible, since the band’s creation myth comes from the election of George W Bush in 2000 and Sugarcult put out Start Static in 2001. But my theory makes sense because, um, shut up, that’s why.
[3]By the by, a playlist consisting of Green Day’s Dookie and Nimrod, Sugarcult’s Start Static, No Doubt’s Tragic Kingdom, Veruca Salt’s Eight Arms to Hold You, Letters to Cleo’s discography, and The Dollyrots’ discography is kind of awesome.
So...I'm not dead. I guess I've got that goin' for me. On the heels[1] of the Being Me stuff I decided I need to get out more and meet more people and say, "You know, that seems like a terrible idea, I'ma go do that," more often. It's kinda like what I tried to force myself to do with last year's Dancing Monkey Project, but it's actually working because I'd gone to great lengths to exorcise the demons that required me to try to force myself to do things like that in the past.
Or, y'know, whatever.
For the record, it's amazing how quickly life starts throwing you curveballs when you decide to do something like that and then actually follow through. Back when I was all Churchy Joe and whatnot we used to talk about the dangers of asking god to open our eyes and lead us to opportunities to do his work because, boom, those opportunities would appear. I've realized now that it's not because the universe changes, but because the way you view and interact with the universe that changes. We close our eyes and ears to so much and tune out everything that's not a direct influence on our desires and habits that we miss just how much there is out there in the world.
There's a lot of world out there, folks. It's terrible and wonderful and big and broad and there's not enough time to see all of it.
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Meanwhile, I've been letting The Gaslight Anthem grow on me. They're kinda what would happen if the guys from Sons of Bill grew up in Jersey and had a bit more of a punk influence on their style. This is a statement that makes no sense and is why people shouldn't write about music and expect to seem like they're anything other than pretentious twits, complete idiots, or completely pretentious idiots. Just, y'know, listen:
That said, they don't seem to have the ability to downshift that Sons of Bill exhibits, so their songs kinda sound the same. Still, I got Handwritten and The '59 Sound the other day and I'm not regretting the decision.
It also seems from live videos that the Gaslight guy...how do I say this...benefits from studio magic. This is not something I would say about, say, James Wilson of Sons of Bill. So I'm less likely to truck my ass out to see Gaslight live is what I'm saying.
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Speaking of Sons of Bill, they seem to have made a new video for "Virginia Calling."
I enjoy both the composition and the storytelling.
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[1]Or the heals, if you enjoy homonym-based punnery. Which I don't. Not in the least little bit.
This would have been the second chapter of the 2010 kinda-sorta re-write of the project that never got off the ground. Note the rather intentional parallel structure to the first chapter. This, like yesterday's entry, is an unedited copy of something I wrote three-ish years ago.
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The last thing Eleanor Jane McIntire's father had said to her was, "When you get tired of this rebellion, you come on back home. We'll be waiting." He'd then tossed the last box in to the back of her rented truck and slammed the door shut.
Eleanor, or Ellie, as everyone called her, was a twenty-five-year old college graduate with dreams of a successful career in the big city and a past she was desperate to escape. She'd lived in a world dominated by men and wanted to know what it meant to be a woman for herself.
Her father wanted to be the image of the stern Southern gentleman. That's what the McIntires had been for as long as he knew, after all. He hadn't bothered to trace his lineage back any farther than a Colonel who served under Joe Johnston in the final days of the War of Northern Aggression. It was just as well, as the hard drinking Irish Catholic immgrants who had scraped together the money necessary to buy passage to the New World in the early 1800s wouldn't exactly have met his high standards. Either way, he expected his boys to grow up to be successful gentlemen as well and live up to the family name. He'd expected his daughter to grow up to be a beautiful debutant, even if they weren't part of the class that had such things, and settle down early to the life of the content homemaker. It was expected, it was right, at least in his world.
Her mother, meanwhile, had other plans. After giving birth to four boys and hoping for a girl the entire time, she'd named her only daughter after Eleanor Roosevelt. It was a little act of defiance. She couldn't have gotten away with naming the girl after Susan B. Anthony, but no one seemed to think twice about a First Lady. Even if she was a powerful, determined woman, she had gotten where she was by being a wife. Ellie's middle name, meanwhile, came from Jane Addams, the social work pioneer who had changed the landscape of Chicago forever. It was a good name, a strong name, one Ellie wore with pride.
Her father called her "Princess," a name Ellie pretended to enjoy but secretly simply endured. She had no urge to be a princess or carry the burden the name held. She didn't want to be daddy's little girl or simply Mrs. So-and-so. But as bad as Princess was, it beat by a country mile the name she wore through most of high school, the name that cause her to burn with shame every time she heard it. Easy Ellie, the boys at school called her. Even after her older brothers beat Tim Johnson so hard he ended up in the hospital the name stuck. It was a whisper, but it was still there. On one level, though, it had been a blessing. Her father had let her leave Atlanta to go away to college in Florida in the hopes that by the time she returned everyone would have forgotten about the whole thing.
She'd made the mistake of growing up tall, headstrong, and beautiful in a world where the girls were supposed to stay virtuous and the youthful indiscretions of the boys were dismissed with a knowing smile, a wink, and the words, "Boys will be boys." It was all her fault in the all-important court of public opinion. It was Ellie who had messed up. That was simply how it worked.
Strange, though, how she'd yearned to hear her father call her Princess after a while. But when Easy Ellie arrived, it seemed that Princess was gone forever. Still, her father had expected her to play the role as best she could from then on out. He'd ask her if she'd met anybody every time she called home from college. When she invariably said she hadn't he would sigh heavily and hand the phone to her mother.
Ellie stayed in college as long as she could, but eventually had to graduate and head back home. She'd taken a job teaching fourth graders at a nearby Christian school, but soon started to feel that her world was far too small. She began dreaming of a life lived according to her own rules and plans. One day she began daydreaming about the life of her middle namesake. Before she realized it, she was making plans to move to Chicago and make use of her double minor in social work and psychology and her major in education.
Ever since she'd left home for the second and, hopefully, last time, her father had not even made a pretense of caring what happened to her or expecting her to meet a man. Her mother always answered the phone and they played a game where both pretended her father had a legitimate reason he couldn't talk and that he sent his love. For the first three months after arriving in Chicago Ellie had cried herself to sleep.
She hadn't actually ended up in Chicago itself. She'd ended up forty miles away from the city in one of the many old river towns that dotted the area. It looked pretty much like every river town in the midwest. A long main street dotted with bars, restaurants, and cute little shops occupying hundred-year old brick and stone buildings dropped sharply towards the river, crossed it on an ornamented span, then climbed another hill on the other side. The farther up the hill out of the river valley or down along the river away from the town center, the more modern the construction became. The cute shops and riverfront parks gave way and were replaced with tract housing, strip malls, Dunkin' Donuts, McDonald's, Meijer, and Menards.
Still, Ellie loved her new home. Easy Ellie was a distant memory, Princess a non-factor. Even if she wasn't exactly the second coming of Jane Addams, she was happy. She had a full-time job working at a day care center and pouring her love in to the children of strangers. Three nights a week she worked at a little coffee shop called the Koffee Klatch. The regulars loved that she was always willing to offer a sympathetic ear and laugh at their lame jokes. And if some of the men seemed just a little too charmed by her southern accent and big, bright, green eyes, well, that was bound to happen sometimes.
And so Eleanor Jane McIntire went through her days outside Chicago, trying desperately to keep herself from realizing that none of her dreams were anywhere close to coming true.
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Whether or not this ends up going anywhere it's important. It marks a sea change in my perception of narrative structure and, possibly more importantly, a new understanding of the nature of the Self and the Other in both the story and reality. It's also the first time I fully realized the importance of empathy in the creation of a character.
Ellie started out as Jack's love interest and the woman to be won over as part of the overall course of the plot. Over the course of the various scenes I sketched out between coming up with the story in 2006 and the attempted re-write in 2010 she became a fully fleshed-out character with her own hopes, dreams, and voice. I realized that just leaving her as the woman who showed up and gave Jack's journey diminished her. More than that, it robbed her of her life and experience and all the things that brought her into Jack's life.
She was actually a far more interesting character than Jack. I think that's why I ended up keying in on names and the idea of namesakes. The idea of a girl growing up knowing she was expected to be a southern belle by her father but also knowing that she was named for Eleanor Roosevelt and Jane Addams by a secretly rebelling mother fascinated me. She'd always had this sort of inherent agency, longing, and darkness that combined in a way that was far, far more interesting than Jack's rather static tale.
The problem was that I wrote myself into a corner by going with the parallel opening chapters. Jack had to be the main character, as the thing that drove the plot was something that happened to him. I thought about making a not-exactly-parallel structure, where we were introduced to both characters as co-equals, then each chapter was from an alternating perspective. That proved to be far, far too difficult to pull off while also preserving the actual narrative arc the story necessitated.
This, for the record, is why the 2010 re-write didn't get too far. I knew how to get through the first half-dozen chapters. After that I was more than a little lost.
So I've had one of those stretches where I've lacked the time and energy to do much writing. As such, I think I shall begin my sketches idea.
I've had an idea sitting out there in various states of incompletion since early 2006. The idea still fascinates me and I love the characters involved. I've never actually been able to write the whole idea, though. I think there are two reasons for that.
First, this project, such as it is, really brought the origin of the sketches idea. I kept seeing scenes of interaction between the characters. I never really knew what happened between the scenes, though. Every time I tried to write their stories I got hung up on the events between the events.
Second, this project, such as it is, straddles the end of my Christianity like nothing else. It arrived during the period of great confusion that marked the beginning of the end. It's stuck with me ever since, with the characters remaining the same while their worlds have changed drastically.
In the spring of 2010 I tried to re-write the book. Well, I tried to write the book in a different way than I'd conceived of it the first time around. I didn't get very far. I'd still like to get somewhere with this one of these days, though.
Today and tomorrow I'll put up the first two chapters from that 2010 re-write. I might put some other stuff up later. This is unedited, for the record. I just pulled it directly out of the file in question.
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The last thing Jackson Paul Reed's father said to him was, "Don't ever let a woman get her claws in to you, kiddo. It just ain't worth it." He'd then thrown a pair of suitcases in to the trunk of his old brown Cutlass and disappeared in a cloud of thick, black exhaust smoke.
Jackson, or Jack, as his biological father had called him, was five years old. He stood in the middle of the street. Watching. Expecting the beat up Oldsmobile to return. It never did.
His father had left plenty of women in the past, but never a kid. He didn't know that a child didn't quite understand the dynamic of relationships between a woman and a man who was terrified of commitment. He didn't know that the kid could grow up blaming himself, could grow up insecure. Chances are, though, he wouldn't have cared. Such is the nature of selfishness.
To her credit, Jack's mother never once attempted to use her son as a stand-in for his deadbeat father. She'd set out as soon as possible in an attempt to find a real man, not the sort of self-focused rebel who stoked the imagination of an 18-year old girl from a small town, then left when things got tough, but the sort of man who was stable. She decided to do it right the second time around.
Tom Patterson was exactly the right sort of man. When he met Cindy Reed he was a thirty-two-year old widower looking for a new start. She was thirty. Jack was twelve. He'd arrived at the door to pick Cindy up on their first date with a bouquet of flowers for her and a Transformer action figure for Jack. Bumblebee.
Jack already had a Bumblebee, but he didn't care. All that mattered to him was that Tom had thought of him. He hadn't heard from his own father in seven years: no calls, no birthday presents, no Christmas cards. Nothing.
His mother had always called him Jackson. She'd named him after Jackson Pollock, hoped that such a name would give him creativity and genius. Tom called him Jack, and so did everyone else, except for about three months during his eighth grade year when all the boys at school called him Action Jackson after he told a whopper about getting his hand under Jennifer Dooley's shirt after a basketball game. She had actually let him kiss her. On the cheek. When word got out about his supposed adventures she'd met him at his locker, slapped him as hard as she could and called him a pervert. Even as a marginally aware thirteen-year old, Jack had been able to recognize the pain in her eyes. He'd vowed right then and there to never hurt another girl again. If anyone was going to get hurt in his future relationships, he decided, it was him.
The one thing nobody ever called Jack was "son." His biological father had always called him "kiddo" before he'd stopped calling him anything at all. His mother called him by name or referred to him as, "My boy." Sometimes, too, she called him "kiddo." Tom had wanted to call him son, but hadn't, even after the official adoption papers went through.
Tom had been hurt and never really understood why Jack refused to take his last name. It was no big deal, really, just the defiance of a teenager struggling for an identity, but Tom had never seen it that way. He had always wanted a son, and even if this wasn't how he'd envisioned getting one, he was determined to make the best of it. The fact that Jack wouldn't completely play along bugged him on some level. It wasn't supposed to work that way.
From the first time Cindy and Jack came in to his life, Tom had regarded his treatment of the boy as one of the most clear-cut aspects of his Christian duty. God had adopted Tom, after all, a metaphysical orphan who had only made it through the years following his first wife's tragic death in a car accident with God's help. He was bound and determined to make sure that Cindy and Jack knew the same God he did. His new wife adjusted to the concept well enough. She'd grown up in church, but really hadn't had time to go in years. She didn't so much leave as much as come up with other things to do with her time.
Jack didn't adjust to the church idea anywhere close to as well as his mother. Nobody really knew why, and Jack didn't say anything because he didn't want to cause any problems. But whenever someone referred to God as the Heavenly Father he winced just a little bit inside. His father had left in a cloud of smoke, after all. What was to stop this other, new father and his big, cosmic father from doing the exact same thing?
Eventually, though, things settled down in the Reed-Patterson household. Teenaged Jack never rebelled like the rest of his peers did. On one level he knew he had it pretty good. On another level he feared that it could disappear at any time. That little five-year old standing in the street trying to figure out what he'd done to chase his dad away had grown up to be a teenager who tried to figure out how to never chase anyone away.
He grew up handsome and awkward. Certain girls saw this and decided to take advantage of him. A succession of clingly bitches used him through high school and college, always taking and rarely giving back. He rarely broke up with a girlfriend even though he always knew within a few days or weeks that he should. Still, with each one he thought that he could help them or, at the very least, he didn't want to hurt them like he'd hurt Jennifer Dooley, like he'd been hurt. So a succession of girls had used him up, sucked him dry, then left him abandoned, hurt, confused, and calling them, weeping, in the middle of the night long after they'd gone on to their next mark.
After a while, Jack began to believe the last words of his father. He vowed at some point to never again let a woman get her claws in to him. It just wasn't worth it.
And so Jackson Paul Reed grew up a living embodiment of one of the great, unspoken truths. Although people rarely get what they actually deserve, most are spectacularly good at getting what they think they deserve.
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Looking back I can honestly say that I wouldn't change much about this chapter. I also absolutely wouldn't include it in anything as is, especially not as the introductory chapter to a book. It's just a bit on the nose. I guess I might have been fascinated with the notion of being on the nose at the time. I don't know.
It's also interesting to me how hard I was trying to flog the idea of god, family, and fathers. The idea of god as a father and, more importantly, as a deadbeat dad, was strong in my mind.
So I think I’m about done with Gavin Menzies’ introduction to 1434. That’s not to say I’m to the end. That’s to say that this will be the last post I write about it because there’s just so goddamn much fail packed into this thing I might never get done.
Also, the latter half of the Introduction is all about Gavin Menzies making sure we know he goes on awesome vacations. No, really. He seems to think that the fact that his vacations are awesome but he doesn’t take vacations from his stupid ideas matter to us. Also, I’m pretty sure he brings up the fact that he knows things because he was the captain of a Royal Navy submarine, which makes him an expert. Captains, after all, are the unimpeachably brilliant successes of the sea.
Just don’t tell the people on the Costa Concordia. Or the penguins covered in oil by the Exxon Valdez. Or the folks from the Titanic. Although it must be said that a Royal Navy-trained captain would probably know better. The Royal Navy, after all, never used one of their pre-dreadnoughts to ram and sink another one of their pre-dreadnoughts because the admiral in charge couldn’t be arsed to figure out that running a 180-degree inward reversal of course is best accomplished when the ships are not within each others’ turning range.
You might be saying that I’m not making a fair comparison. Gavin Menzies, after all, never once rammed the HMS Rorqual into the HMS Camperdown. Fair point, that. My point is, though, that there’s nothing magical about “going to sea,” even though Menzies seems to think that matters. The truth is that I’ve never been to sea, either, but I could still draw a pretty decent map of the world.
Well, I couldn’t, really. I’m a terrible artist.
Anyway, fuck that noise. We’ve got unsupported assertions to deal with here.
Menzies makes an interesting statement after dragging Schoner and Waldseemuller’s good names through the mud.
Similarly, Brazil appeared on Portuguese maps before the first Portuguese, Cabral and Dias, set sail for Brazil.
This literally comes out of nowhere. He tosses it in as an aside after his claims that the di Virga map depicted Australia, which I covered last time out. The problem here is that there’s no evidence Cabral had a map of Brazil. We know next to nothing about what sort of kit Cabral had and all of the indications are that Cabral’s discovery of Brazil was a happy accident or, possibly, a secret instruction to find out if there was anything on Portugal’s side of the line from the Treaty of Tordesillas.
We simply don’t know what, if anything, Cabral knew. Well, that’s not true. We do know that they had to engage in a bit of surveying to prove that the land was, indeed, on Portugal’s side of the Tordesillas line. Oh, and we know that Brazil’s original name was Island of the True Cross. Because they thought it was a fucking island. Which is problematic for Menzies’ Chinese map theory.
I suppose you could make up a theory that the Portuguese were doing it to bullshit the Spanish. The fact is, though, that nobody knew what was what in the New World at the time and the Portuguese were in the right – at least where the Spanish and the Pope were concerned, which was the only issue that mattered to them at the time – to claim the land. There was no real need to call the land a big island for the purposes of subterfuge.
It doesn’t matter, though. You see, Gavin Menzies is engaging in a Gish Gallop here, just throwing out information without backing it up. If I’m charitable I’ll admit that’s because I’m still in the Introduction. Still, though, it’s a lot of bullshit. Perhaps I’d have a better grasp on what he thinks is going on if I’d read all of 1421. Perhaps I wouldn’t be writing these posts, though. I don’t think they’d allow me to access my blog from the loony bin.
So what’s his next bit of information? I’m glad you asked:
The South Shetland Islands were shown on the Piri Reis map four hundred years before Europeans reached the Antarctic.
I’ve seen the Piri Reis Map. I have no fucking clue what Menzies is talking about. This should shock no one.
Piri Reis, or Piri the Captain, was one of the captains who served the first generation of what would be known as the Barbary Pirates. He was a navigator and a mapmaker and the producer of the most detailed maps of the Mediterranean available to the armadas of the Sultan during the 16th Century. He produced a world map in 1513 that looked quite a bit like the earlier Caverio and Cantino maps. Take a look at the Atlantic in the Piri Reis:
It’s also likely that Piri Reis would have had access to either the Ruysch map or the Waldseemuller map or both. It’s pretty easy to look at the Piri Reis Map and see the influence of the earlier maps. That’s pretty much always been the historical consensus about the Piri Reis map as far as I know. This consensus is aided and abetted by the fact that early 16th Century mapmakers liberally stole from their source material all the freaking time. And, hell, Piri Reis was a fucking pirate, so there’s that.
One thing Reis did that was different from his source material, though, was to draw other land in around South America. This land, it should be noted, conforms to absolutely no land that exists anywhere near South America, as it makes it look like South America stretches almost to Africa just south of Brazil. There was absolutely nothing analogous to that landform on any maps before or after 1513. Magellan hadn’t done his thing yet, but Vasco de Gama, Cabral, and Amerigo Vespucci would have known better by then.
The most likely explanation is pretty simple: Piri Reis decided to duplicate the shape of South America from the Ruysch map or the Waldseemuller map but ran out of paper, so he drew it around the corner. This is a much easier explanation to swallow than the idea that he was drawing an accurate depiction of the South Shetland Islands. That theory would require us to believe that Piri Reis had a super accurate Chinese map of the world that somehow put Antarctica on a line directly between Uruguay and South Africa.
Menzies then follows up his unsupported assertions with this paragraph:
The great European explorers were brave and determined men. But they discovered nothing. Magellan was not the first to circumnavigate the globe, nor was Columbus the first to discover the Americas. So why, we may ask, do historians persist in propagating this fantasy? Why is The Times Atlas of World Exploration, which details the discoveries of European explorers, still taught in schools? Why are the young so insistently misled?
Good god, but the man is a fucking idiot. And a self-important fucking idiot at that.
Either way, I give up on the Introduction. Join me next week when I wade into the giant pile-o-fail that is, well, the rest of the goddamn book.
So back when I wrote my Being Me posts and then wandered off into the weeds with stuff that annoyed me about the internet I thought I’d wrap it all up with a post about bullying as an act of enforcing conformity. My general, overarching point was that anyone can become a bully. All it takes is attempting to force other people to conform to a specific notion of what it means to be a [insert group here]. The bullied sometimes become the bullies when they get power. It’s a tic of human nature, basically.
The solution to bullying, I’ve come to believe, is to say, “I am [insert label here] and you don’t get to define that for me.” Alternately, in the case of some bullies – such as MRAs, who compelled me to write a recent post – the solution is to say, “I don’t give a shit what you think, since your labels are stupid and don’t apply to me. Or reality.” It helps when people outside that specific situation then come alongside and help people see the bigger picture. This idea was basically the genesis of Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project, to name a famous example.
The last couple days an interesting thing has been happening over at Scalzi’s place that illustrates my point way better than the post I never wrote would have. A fellow Scalzi refers to as the Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit (RSHD for short, because Scalzi has no urge to use his real name or link to him) has been talking all kinds of shit about Scalzi for the last few months using fairly standard MRA bullshit. This resulted in a lot of trolls heading over to Whatever and annoying the hell out of Scalzi. Scalzi doesn’t seem to like being annoyed by trolls that much. So he did something about it.
Specifically, he pledged to donate money to organizations pushing for equality every time the RSHD mentioned him, capped out at a grand. That’s where the internet took over, specifically the bit where Scalzi is one of the true mensches of the internet and has one hell of a following. Other people started pledging, too. By the end of the day the pledges were over $20,000. By now, three days later, the pledges are at over $50,000.
That’s pretty much amazing. It’s a whole lot of people standing up and saying, “We don’t want your bullying. But we’re going to make something good come out of it and make you look like an ass in the process.” It won’t stop the RSHD, since he seems to get off on shit like this, but this sort of thing isn’t directed at the RSHD. It’s directed at observers to show that there are those who are willing to stand up to the bullies. It’s also intended to show that the bullies themselves are absurd and can be effectively ignored.
It seems to be working, too. Scalzi got a write-up in the freaking Guardian. And the Guardian article called the RSHD a “Racist Sexist Homophobic Dipshit.” It also didn’t use the RSHD’s real name nor did it link to his blog(s). It’s brilliant, really.
Scalzi also commissioned some art. See, MRAs use the (largely discredited) notion of Alpha and Beta males to make sure everyone knows they’re the alphas and everyone who isn’t exactly like them is a beta or a gamma or whatever and, therefore, inferior. There are also animal themes in there for some reason. Scalzi’s solution was to say, “Hey, in your taxonomy I’m a Gamma Rabbit. That sounds like an awesome thing to be, since I’m happy.”
That’s the only way to approach people who try to call you inferior but whose only power is with words. Take away the power of those words and you stymie the bullying.
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I figured out who the RSHD was almost immediately. Spend any time on the internet paying attention to MRAs and one name pops up a lot: Vox Day, aka Theodore Beale. He’s harassed PZed and Ed Brayton over the years, who are also a couple of guys who don’t let bullies use them as chew toys. They have a different, significantly less whimsical style, though.
I checked over at Pharyngula to see if PZed had anything to say, mostly out of curiosity. What he had was a link to a Jim Hines post about Beale running for President of the SFWA, an organization for speculative fiction authors which has been headed by one John Scalzi for the last couple of years. I find that notion fascinating.
If you go back to my previous MRA post about an idiot who went after Fred it occurs to me that the entire reason anyone becomes a bully, especially an internet bully, is because they’re deeply unhappy. So they define themselves according to some scale where they can show the world (themselves, mostly) how amazing they are). Seeing someone who doesn’t use their scale but who is also obviously content with the world must, then, be absolutely awful.
That’s basically why Scalzi keeps saying that Vox has a mancrush on him. I’m not saying that Vox Day is a deeply self-loathing closet case (mostly because I have endeavored to know as little about him as possible). I’m saying that Vox Day is a great example of a deeply self-loathing bully who keeps trying to find meaning by emulating the path and then destroying the happiness of others. That must be an awful way to live.
It’s why, on some level, I feel sorry for MRAs. They’re sad, sad people.
I tend to put up some sort of State of the Blog post every year. I usually do it in January, I think. I also usually put up a bunch of grandiose plans that there’s no fucking way I’ll ever be able to actually carry out.
In truth, the blog isn’t really an important focus of mine. Nobody pays me to do it. Not that many people read it. I just do it because I like writing and I don’t have a lot of outlets for writing these days.
So I don’t have a big State of the Blog this year. I have five plans, such as they are:
1. I’m going to do the After Tamerlane stuff. Because it’s cool.
2. I’d like to get back to the Byzantine Logic stuff. I realized the other day that I haven’t done a proper Byzantine Logic post since before the move from Blogspot to Typepad, which is kind of crazy.
3. 1434 Fridays. At least, I’d like to do 1434 Fridays at least three times a month.
4. I’ve had an idea kicking around that I call “sketches.” Basically, I get some interesting character sketches knocking about from time to time. They’re usually short, single scenes of interaction between two or three characters. I usually don’t have any intention of doing anything with the scene itself in a larger scheme. I believe, though, that writing fiction is an act of empathy and sometimes a writer simply has to practice that empathy. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a whole series of novels. Sometimes it’s in the form of characters who occupy a single page.
5. I never finished A Distant, Dreadful Star. This, I fear, is inexcusable. Part of the problem is that I started writing it right before I bought the house. Part of the problem is that I started writing it because I had a beginning but had no end. It’s now sat dormant for nearly a year as far as writing is concerned. It hasn’t been dormant in my mind, however, and I know exactly where the story has to go.
As such, feel free to read the first ten installments of A Distant, Dreadful Star. The long lost (no, really, I wrote it back in March of 2012) 11th installment shall go up tomorrow. For some reason I thought it would work better as the 12th installment and I needed to write another, more differenter installment first. Looking back, I don’t think that’s the case. With any sort of luck there will be a new installment every Wednesday until I finish.
Also, and I say this with a certain level of amazement, I’m really excited about this. I was re-reading some bits that I haven’t looked at since I originally wrote them and there were several things that caused me to think, “Holy shit, I can actually write.” I know that writers are supposed to hate everything that they wrote in the past because they’re never supposed to be satisfied. I’ll admit that A Distant, Dreadful Star is far from perfect. I’ll also admit that there are some parts that say exactly what I want them to say in exactly the way I want them to do it.
Sometimes you have to acknowledge the good is what I’m saying.
So I managed to make it exactly one week on the 1434 Fridays idea. That's...that's par for the course.
I am planning on getting back to it, don't worry. This week was just a bit odd. See, on Tuesday night I was here:
That's Soundgarden. That's Soundgarden at the Riviera Theater. That's Soundgarden at the Riviera Theater with me about, oh, fifty feet from the stage. It was a religious experience.
The setlist was amazing. They only played five songs off of the new album, four of which were the four actual tolerable songs from the new album: "Rowing," "By Crooked Steps," "Worse Dreams," and "Non-State Actor." They also played "Been Away Too Long," which wasn't so great, but it was the first song and that seemed to be par for the course.
Either way, I'd trade that Soundgarden show for any five shows I've been to in my life. It was that amazing. I was pretty much sold halfway through when they played "Loud Love" and then followed it with "Big Dumb Sex." This is "Big Dumb Sex," which is probably NSFW:
So, weirdly, I knew "Big Dumb Sex" from the first chord. I didn't realize that "Rowing" wasn't "By Crooked Steps" until the song was over. And I thought "Worse Dreams" was called "Bad Dreams." So...I guess I'm that guy, now.
Either way, since I ain't done with this, apparently, here's the setlist:
Been Away Too Long My Wave Worse Dreams Room a Thousand Years Wide Jesus Christ Pose - intro tag of Jesus Loves Me, which was a nice touch Rhinosaur Non-State Actor Drawing Flies Hunted Down Loud Love Big Dumb Sex Blow Up the Outside World Fell on Black Days Tighter & Tighter Burden in My Hand Rowing Superunknown Fresh Tendrils Nothing to Say Spoonman Black Hole Sun 4th of July Encore Break Outshined Rusty Cage By Crooked Steps Incessant Mace
Basically, if I were to make the perfect Soundgarden setlist with the caveat that it had to have a decent number of new songs...this is pretty close. My perfect list would cut "Been Away Too Long" and add "Like Suicide," "Slaves & Bulldozers," and "Searching with My Good Eye Closed." If I were also expecting a pony it would involve "Ty Cobb." If I had to take anything out to get those additions I'd remove "Spoonman" and "Blow Up the Outside World." I would have said "Incessant Mace" before Tuesday, but it's a really cool show ender.
The show ender is an important song. Pearl Jam famously plays "Yellow Ledbetter" to end pretty much every set. Roger Clyne & the Peacemakers play "Nada." The Saw Doctors play "Hey Wrap." Some bands don't really have an ender, but for the bands that do it's an important signal that, y'know, it's time to go home. Soundgarden played "Slaves & Bulldozers" as the ender last year on pretty much all the shows I looked up. "Incessant Mace" works about as well. I think "Like Suicide" would be an excellent choice, too.
Also, Chris Cornell kept referring to The Riviera as The Vic, which amused me to no end. My favorite venue in Chicago is the Vic. My second favorite venue is probably the Riviera (although my love of The Beat Kitchen knows no bounds and Schubas, the Double Door, and The Hideout are all very cool).[1]
Either way, Soundgarden's on the headline and all's right with the world.
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So it's February in Chicago. February in Chicago is the absolute fucking worst. Scott Lucas and Brian St. Clair would like to tell you about it.
I have mixed feeling about that video. "Another February" is very much a political song in the middle of what is very much a political album. The way they set it up looks like it's definitely commentary on the point of the song: that life is pretty much shit for people who don't have money. It looked like a perfect setup for, "It's always February for some people."
Then it got to the bit at the end with the snow globe.
Either way, this year February is even crazier, since on Tuesday I went to the Soundgarden show wearing a hoodie over a long-sleeve t-shirt with no coat, since it was in the 50s in Chicago. Then we got a cold snap on 1/31 and it was awful.
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So you might be asking yourself how I've managed to write a full post about Soundgarden and Local H but couldn't seem to write a 1434 post. Basically, I came down with an awesome flu/fever (fluver?) thing. Right now I have zero energy and my head hurts. Tossing 1434 on top of that seems like a really bad idea.
For the record, the 1434 posts (and the 1421 posts before them and, actually, the After the Flood posts from way back in the day) are the hardest posts to write. There's just so much awful packed into every paragraph that it's hard to know where to begin. That takes energy. Energy I don't have right now.
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Also, after I took a nap this afternoon/evening I watched the pilot episode of The Americans on FX. Two of my favorite shows of the last few years are White Collar and Burn Notice. The Americans is basically like those plus Homeland (which I do not watch, by the by). It's definitely more Homeland in tone than either of the USA shows, though. Either way, I am enthused.
Nothing like a show starring Felicity as a hard-ass Soviet sleeper agent during the Reagan years...
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[1]Yeah...I guess I need to list my favorite Chicago venues now.
1. The Vic 2. The Riviera 3. The Beat Kitchen 4. Double Door 5. Schuba's 6. The Aragon 7. The Hideout 1,506. House of Blues 1,507. UIC Pavilion
I've also seen shows at the United Center and Soldier Field. I don't like stadium shows, really. Also, weirdly, I kinda liked the House of Blues Dallas. My theory for all venues is that their main purpose should be to put as little in the way of the people trying to see music as possible. The more shit, the worse the grade. The Vic wins on accessibility and feel. The Riviera is basically a slightly larger Vic, but the problem is that it's laid out sideways. The back of the main floor of the Vic goes right outside. At the Riv you have to walk down a hallway, so it can be a pain in the ass to get in or out. The Aragon has a hallway plus a staircase. The Beat Kitchen, Double Door, Schuba's, and the Hideout are simply too small for that to be a problem.
The HoB loses on two things: overbearing staff and a tendency towards all-ages shows. I get that all ages = more money, but all ages also often means 16 year-olds who just got let out of the house for the first time and don't know what the fuck they're doing.
The UIC Pavilion is just awful. It's got this single, narrow concourse that they choke with merch tables and adult beverage stands when there are shows, so it's basically impossible to get in or out if the place is full. For the record, the place was quite full in July of 2012 when I saw Soundgarden there...
Oddly, I've never been to the Metro. There are five legendary Chicago venues for rock shows: the Double Door, the Vic, the Riviera, the Aragon Ballroom, and the Metro. I'm not sure why I haven't been to the Metro.
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