Sitting on Several of the Best Albums of the Seventies

Marshall McLuhan

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 19 March 2014.

McLuhan: "Do you know what the satellite does to you? As an environment, when it goes around the planet? Its a proscenium arch. It turns the planet into a stage, makes you want to be an actor."

I feel like the architecture (if we can call something so destabilized architecture!) to make the project authentically postmodern is all in place...thanks for all the hard work!

Now we just need to give it to God.

I've been thinking about maybe writing a few, for lack of a better term, gags.

One is a Tiger Beat magazine profile of the young Arthur. I think the idea of Arthur saying anything that, say, Chachi or David Cassidy might say is absolutely hilarious.  So is the idea that Will or a Tiger Beat writer would have just ended up making everything up.  I'm also curious to see if my sister might be able to take a picture of you from high school and turn it into a Tiger Beat profile.

I'm also thinking about revisiting The Sweet World children's show and maybe making Arthur's children's book.  It's probably a decent time for me to work on artifacts.  I feel like the basic frame of the story is solid enough for now.  The blog demands some looseness to it, we've got a solid enough big picture to guide us, and we don't have any pressing need to put out the big picture epic in any form.

Your recent blog entries discussing songs reinforces this itch I have to devote time to our music.

I'd like to shoot for an album...any era, but in the mean time, if you want to play with some more Garage Band stuff, that would be awesome.  I really do feel that the most accessible key for the audience to unlock the world of Arthur White is the music.  I think you underplay how good it is...I've said it before, but I think you are sitting on several of the best albums of the seventies.

We're living in the age of the un-/underdiscovered icon and we've got not just an epic to unleash but an entire culture...we've got our message, our cultural relevance, a lifetime's worth of artistic work lying in wait if we can ever get the enthusiasm and support for the project underway, and I think we've done the right thing in making the project enormous and unmanageable rather than containable and shallow.

But the music is always going to be the best part and the way in.

The three of us will always go into these eccentric intellectual and theoretical places, but the music hits people of any sort of bent. It's what breathes life into the characters, too, and the story, for that matter.

In the music is God working through Arthur and Arthur's struggle to respond to his calling, Will's struggle to serve his family and channel Arthur's art into the fulfillment of the American dream--it's the candle that attracts the moth of Joe Lazarus, Sr. and the key that helps Joe, Jr. atone with his father's legacy, the prize that attracts Dr. Carlton Farthington, and the gift that God gave the world.

In some ways, every character is defined by that fact--how do we deal with this gift?

And that question may be the key for my figuring out how to take something so postmodern and keep it in the spirit of a morality play...no matter how outlandish we get or where other authors take the story, there will always be a set of foils dealing with the question of how we handle a blessing, not to mention the three of us.

And there will always be the problem that postmodern people in general don't recognize blessings anymore.

We might be able to help sharpen a dying instinct.