Farthington's Voicemail: Because knology. Is is what's being.

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has recently been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.



5/30/14 11:37 PM 4 weeks ago

I just want to finish up here and and just say, That's something interesting worth mentioning is, is that this Is that the worldly. Because knology. Is is what's being. I was the did here. That You Know. We've done away with this sort of trained send in to comprise in that no longer. And yet We have all these empty roles, but I need to be still hold. And, and so the dinosaur kind of place. The role of God for us. You know it's it's kind of a topic a believe. In this song and and you know there's this opportunity to maybe encounter that Scott. You know that God Of of the world that Subject, but I thought that I object of our believe. In person and and that the that's always kind of a possibility or a Tennessee that's held on 2 some other things. That I would mention is well, ohh. Is it you know if if if there is. No Union, with Scott. 2 attained. And there's no You know, getting to that getting to the center of Dean. In Christ, and and you know, the father putting in Christ enough being Craig third Christ being in the father that whole thing, kind of. I think it is in spite time. Chapter 14 worked You know everyone's in one another. That sort of reality. If that doesn't exist and that's not possible then. Where'd a week, totally kind of maybe go to the center of the error. You know if you're earth is our only refuge. Then we might entertain some kind of. Hi Dee, Yeah kind of replacement idea, that going to the center of the earth. Is where we might find refuge and you know of course. There is some and I'll guess things there as well that You know, it's, it's very hot and we're gonna have lots of things burned away in that process. You know, and then it starts to break now. You know, but I mean. It's kind of like we tried this put all prop all these other things up in place of the transcend and Ideas, and. And, yes, they.

Farthington's Voicemail: Shh, Shh, Shh, Shh

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has recently been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.




5/30/14 11:29 PM 4 weeks ago

And I'm tied up all that. I think you know the dinosaur is is a pretty interesting, metaphor for so many different things. Yes, one thing is This thing that is Ben spelled over for so long. It is it. It has so many different associations. With the Don of time. You know, with very primitive prime ordeal times and Also, I think calling tonight and some some Ideas of the Garden of Eden and creation, probably talk to you okay hey. Shh, Shh, Shh, Shh, okay check. Yeah, I can't talk too long ago. You know some other things. Also our You know this is really been sort of a cornerstone for a certain kind of a tia's. I think in recent times and and in some ways the dinosaur is the God I was a Tia's you know. It's just such a punk see. Okay bridge, kacoos or who 6 You know the dinosaur is is kind of is taking that place and to save the You know they never existed. But You know it gets into this. Interesting thing where we've no one's ever seen one. Let me see lots of skills and them. It's a really kind of amazing thing to think about or even imagine the, dinosaur could've fixes stating that the dinosaur could still exists in that it's not just the police. I am, are you know about that incident. Ohh. I'm going to look at it took. I got to leave so bye hello. I had to go over there and called your, and. That is no longer a police the reality are alright because we're being on. I think that alright alright. You're going to get that guy. This way sweet dreams.

Farthington's Voicemail: The Prime ordeal

A treasure trove of Carlton Farthington's voicemails has recently been made available to the blog.  At the request of researchers, enthusiasts, law enforcement agencies, and other followers of the project, voice-to-text transcriptions have been published as-is rather than edited for sense.  We hope that this will better capture the texture of the spoken word, rendering it more accessible and/or flexible for the diverse purposes of our audience.



5/30/14 11:25 PM 3 weeks ago

I'll talk a little bit about on the phone. But I'm working on HI Science, which I think is. Kinda be pretty central to. The Story. Obviously hey you know I. I think what we're talking about here is trying to get back in touch with some sort of prime ordeal reality, something that's been lost and In some ways 5 intend, although he. Although you You know are not terribly concerned about any of this. You are absolutely right. That You Know. Something has been lost something has been lost. And And that we need to. Goes searching for that thing and we need to. You know give up. Some of the certain keys that we've kind of snowed. Over. The Prime ordeal swamped frozen it paved over at so as to not have to deal with it anymore. And that frozen within that our dinosaurs and that yet. We need to allow all that sauce and and in that process. Yes, the dinosaurs will. Steve released but. Then we also can begin our product progress yet and and also actually One of the precipitated events of all this is gonna be the explosion of a volcano that has been snowed. Over. But you can never be snort over permanently. And so. The explosion of the volcano the melting of the ice other leasing of these dinosaurs these are all necessary things and and then you know once that happens, and ice cold water flows down into these volcanic tunnels, and we can proceed, safely into the center of the earth. So we can remain there, until the turbulent rehearsals have occurred where we can be safe, from all those things. And so, in some ways. There is a reality. At the core of all this even though It is seen through your distorted disorder, viewpoint. So that's kind of some of the things that I'm working on the song.

The History of Arthur White: Felix Culpa

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Will sees the brass ring of Arthur's rockstardom right as Arthur sees the brass ring of sainthood.

Unfortunately, Arthur has no interest in being a rockstar and Will has no interest in Arthur's being a saint. Arthur can't even appreciate the huge gravity of Will's selling the family business to Anthony in order to fund the second recording and deal with further lawsuits (the record company refused an advance after the first Brand New Life masters disappeared). Brand New Life starts to unravel as Fr. Bernie is given a new placement and most of the group feels too uncomfortable about dealing with Arthur's mysticism and Will's tyranny toward Arthur.

Present-day Will trying really hard

Only Joe Lazarus stays with Arthur, plotting with him to sneak away to his friend's place in Colorado where they can make the album Arthur is called to make without Will's interference. Unfortunately, Will, who senses that desperate measures are needed to get his brother back on track, commits Arthur and has a series of electroshock treatments administered to him. Joe doesn't understand why Arthur doesn't show up at the rendezvous point, and he drifts away, brokenhearted, feeling like his divine purpose was taken away from him, and dies after years of touring in various groups, a failed marriage that produced a child, and stints in rehab until his death in a drunk driving accident.

The ECT has a few unexpected effects.

One is that Arthur is fried so badly that he can't make music for years.Will wanted control over Arthur, and what he got was total control: dependency from a helpless brother. Will dealt with that by institutionalizing Arthur, but after a while, he couldn't afford to anymore, and his girlfriend Linda convinced him to move Arthur to their home in Lansing. Even then, Will just let Linda, a nurse, care for Arthur and spent as little time as he could with him. He just couldn't deal with the anger or the guilt. As Linda spent time healing Arthur, though, she had a mystical experience through him and left Will to become a missionary sister, which meant Will had to take care of Arthur.

He now blames Arthur for driving away Linda.

After years of taking care of Arthur, Will's feelings have mellowed, and some days, Will even wonders about the goals he chased, the damage he did to his brother, and the emptiness of what he thought was the American Dream.

Other days, he convinces himself that he was right.

He's defensive about feeling like a failure, especially as far as his vow to his mother is concerned.  He tries to hide his own aging, paradoxically, by dressing like his heroes from the sixties. His main sense of dignity, these days, comes from the fact that he has always taken care of his brother.

Arthur, on the other hand, has healed far more than Will knows, although he will never fully recover. Will never got the mystical side of Arthur. The ECT severed Arthur's ability to discern the difference between mystical reality and reality as most people perceive it, chronological time and Kairos, memory and history, etc. The result was an overwhelming flood of truth and beauty through the Sweet World that Arthur has slowly been sorting out through daily mass, mortification, and obsessive prayer (especially the rosary, which helps him know he's talking to Mary).

He has made very slow progress, but, over the course of thirty years, he has come to remember his calling to make the last album and to deliver it to Joe Lazarus. Over the past year, he has been making music again and Will has come to enjoy it; he even has a little drumset set up by the organ just in case Arthur stumbles on something worthwhile. What Will doesn't know is that Arthur is recording songs to send to Joe Lazarus. Arthur doesn't know Joe is dead, but Joe Jr. will get them in the mail and begin his quest to understand his father, shoot his student film, and resuscitate the career of Arthur White.

And ultimately, we have the story of a felix culpa: Arthur makes the album he was called to make, Joe finds peace and meaning through a return to the Church, and Will repents and finds God.

Plus, the audience is transformed through the story, told through a decade of amazing music, and through their own roles in bringing the story to life.

The History of Arthur White: Brand New Life

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

Will moved Arthur back into the family home and spent a few months nursing Arthur back to health.

He saw Arthur's downfall as his own fault and decided that he would do a better job this time around fulfilling his promise to their mother. He went to their local parish and got the name of Fr. Bernard, a priest with a counseling degree who was an accomplished musician and started bringing him by the house to counsel Arthur. Fr. B also spent a lot of time talking with Will and helped him realize the mistakes he had made with the Sweet World. Will decided that if he helped Arthur put a band together with people he liked who were living good, Catholic lives, and if he held back the pressures of touring and recording, Arthur would be able to become the person he was meant to be. Arthur loved the idea and named the group Brand New Life, which Will modified to Arthur White's Brand New Life.

The early days of Brand New Life were some of the best Will and Arthur had together. Will rented a home in the country and moved the whole band in together. Everyone, even Will, went to daily mass. Everyone played music, cooked meals, did chores. After a while, Agniesczka even visited with the children. Will was able to keep an eye on the company, which helped resolve some tensions with Anthony, who was still angry that Will completely dropped out of the picture during The Sweet World days. Arthur especially bonded with Joe Lazarus, a guitar player and recovering drug addict. The two of them became accountability partners and, for the first time, Arthur had a male friend he could trust other than his brother. He and Arthur both took to their therapy of praying while making felt banners, and together they made the album cover for the first Brand New Life album. The band played softball with the Rockets and other Detroit bands, which Will loved because it gave him a chance to goof around with his old buddy Johnny Bee Badanjek.

The success of Brand New Life was a complicated blessing. Arthur's therapy and prayer life helped him so much that he not only regained his ability to return to the Sweet World almost at will, but he realized that the woman was the Virgin Mary and her child was the baby Jesus! Arthur's channel to the divine reopened, and this time around, Arthur could enter it as a healthy adult. The result was that by the time Arthur was supposed to make the second Brand New Life album, he was ready to make an album of prophecy about Christ's redemption of a fallen America--not at all the sort of record Will wanted the group to make. Will was like most Catholic Americans: he believed in a happy medium of heaven and earth in which heaven is the optional cherry on top of the sundae of a productive life. He was like parents who get their kids Catholic educations to get them into college--not heaven. Will would see Kierkegaard's ethical sphere as the highest acceptable sphere of existence, but the religious sphere is just nuts.

Somehow, he never once had an experience of God that disrupted his concrete view of reality even for a moment.

The History of Arthur White: Tokyo Nights

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

The Sweet World master tapes disappeared. Agniesczka got tired of Arthur's flightiness and divorced him.

A bootleg of the master tapes had surfaced in Japan and become a huge seller, so Will decided to travel to Japan to tour and sue, with the thought that even if they couldn't win the lawsuit, they could record the second album and have a built-in audience hungry for it. He used this quest to get a little leverage with the record company, who wanted the case of their missing tape solved and wanted their advance and lost potential profits recouped.

The group began a tour of Japan. The hard work over the past two years had kept Arthur from mass except on Sundays. One night, a waitress said she was a huge fan and asked if he'd like to go sightseeing. She ended up introducing him to members of her cult, although Arthur didn't understand that at the time. The more time he spent with them, the more free he felt.

They encouraged him to relinquish all of the baggage and burdens that were causing him trouble. Arthur decided to make a break with the Sweet World, stranding them in Japan and creating a grudge that lasts to this very day. Arthur brought cult member Silent Rick with him to do a BBC television special, then announced on TV that he was leaving the Sweet World and launching a new band with his new friends from Japan.

When they returned to Japan, the cult kept Arthur in hiding so Will couldn't get to him. Will had to give up his lawsuit in order to figure out how to get The Sweet World home with no money. Arthur had given it all to the cult.

Inside the cult, Arthur formed Apotheosis. The cult also convinced him to give them the master tapes and rights to his old songs as a way of breaking with his tortured past.

After a while, Arthur asked why the cult asked him to renounce so much, but never filled the emptiness with any substance. They responded by teaching him an arcane meditation technique. Arthur began meditating and promptly saw the woman from the Sweet World, whose baby was now crying. She showed him the true nature of the cult, which had been stealing his music, keeping him from mass, breaking up his family, and siphoning his spiritual powers. She warned him to leave immediately and showed him a vision of a freighter docking twenty miles down the main road.

Arthur snuck out of the compound, walked all night, and boarded the freighter that morning. The freighter eventually brought him through the Panama Canal to New York, where customs officials contacted Will about the starving, passportless stowaway.

Will drove out and brought Arthur back home.

Epic Finale (Part 2 of 2)

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

Now, fast forwarding past the pilot program, past Iceland, past the tunnels, out to the house out on Topsail Island... I imagine this is the place Steffi and/or Farthington choose to fully enter the waters.

Possibly inside the house there is a hole dug down through the floor of the inner room with a huge, water-filled hollow in the sand below. The implication is that whatever was dwelling in this house has become some kind of monster, entering the waters offshore.

Attacks on human beings would be good at this point and a hunt for a rogue great white might commence. Perhaps they succeed in tagging the beast, which is something a lot worse than a great white. It would be fun to see where and how fast the beast swims. Does it suddenly disappear from the tracker, having dove too deep, and then suddenly reappear directly beneath the boat, headed toward the surface at some ridiculous speed?

Farthington could return at this point with much fanfare (why not?!), claiming to have the skills and knowledge necessary to combat the beast. I've always wanted him to have a submarine, sort of like L. Ron Hubbard had a fleet of ships. The name of his submarine is the Ericsson--Google Voice's mis-transcription of something in my calls, but also significant because it is seemingly a failed attempt to render Leif Erikson's (or Ericson or Eriksson) name, who I say is the progenitor of the American Dream.

He had originally wanted to use the submarine to bring up some kind of glowing lodestone that had been launched into the ocean (or into orbit) by the volcano blast. This could be what the both of them are now after. A critical idea at this point is that there is a beast underground and a beast underwater--I don't know what the significance of that is, but we can't drop the ball with that. Similarly, the lodestone, which was originally in the heart of the volcano, is now in the waters (or in orbit). There, you've got your 4 elements again! What I like is that this lodestone--so primordial, pagan, and nefarious--is the true power behind the American Dream, that it has surfaced in other contexts and epochs in history, threatening the beauty of humanity and creation with utter destruction.

Heck, anything could happen at this point!

Aliens could come back to get the lodestone too and Armageddon break out with angels and archangels battling aliens and devils. And maybe some lone figure standing on the rim of the volcano playing an acoustic guitar. A funny ending would be him/her finishing the song, then launching the guitar into the caldera--all in slo-mo of course, suggesting that this is somehow going to bring an end to the chaos--but then have it land and sink into the lava and nothing happen. Then, you could have a whole succession of things get thrown into the caldera: the tapes, drivers licenses, everyone's clothes, a couple self-sacrificial characters, etc. Maybe something finally works. Maybe the whole earth blows up. The end.

Whether any of this sticks, I like workshopping some ideas that might be going on in Arthur White's head. In our interview with Scott, I liked how Will and Art were always in separate realities, always pulling in separate directions.

If nothing else, I'd like to get some of this material out in an interview at some point. Maybe that's the only way we hear about the buried worker, the beast, the jawless Steffi or Farthington, the lodestone, the submarine, the apocalyptic battle. Kind of like Narnia is in one sense a child's imagination trying to come to grips with the terrors of war and the reality of evil. This story is a mentally destroyed man's way of making sense of what has happened to himself and to the world.

You could use the deus ex machina that all of this happened in the short span of time during which Arthur was being zapped, sort of like Tobias Wolff's story "Bullet in the Brain."

Epic Finale (Part 1 of 2)

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

Some further ideas about Steffi.

Glaucus and Scylla

She needs to start out very young and innocent seeming, so I don't see her clawing her way to the top at an earlier part of her life. She was an undergraduate from Oberlin at the time of the pilot program, but didn't know (or seemed not to know) what she had signed up for. Overall, she affects a Midwestern sensibility and is the last one you would expect to become a sea devil. But the same could be said about Scylla, who just happened to be loved by Glaucus, who was in turn was loved by the witch, Circe.

Could she show up as an ostensibly naive and wide-eyed girl at an event for Arthur White and express a lot of interest in and admiration for Will and/or Arthur?

It may or may not be known at that moment that she is a Farthington student/cult member. Will lets down his guard thinking that this is some know-nothing groupie and maybe they end up going home, but, at the moment of anagnorisis, Will realizes that she was the one who took something essential (what, I don't know). And why did she take that critical thing? One of two reasons: (1) Farthington put her up to it or (2) she had already resolved to supplant Farthington and was now making moves of her own. In either case, she does supplant Farthington (maybe--I like your idea of him faking his death or disappearance regularly).

I like that moment in the tunnels being unclear, because the whole Schrödinger's cat/mascot suit thing depends on it.

But at least a couple episodes will pass with us not suspecting her at all, just thinking, "Wow, how weird that Will had this random encounter with a Farthington follower." I like that you are confused at this point, because one of the interpretations of the "turbulent reversals" is that everything becomes ambiguous, all narrators become untrustworthy, and the "many worlds interpretation" of Schrödinger's cat kicks in. That's officially the moment at which your exacting explanations cease to make sense and my crazy ones start seeming sensible!

I do like the jawless Steffi and/or Farthington, but I'm not sure how we find that out.

I find it much more terrifying to never see the actual carnage, but to hear about it in one or more ways. By the time one or both of them resurface, it is inside the mascot suit, so we have no idea what the situation is. I like the idea that, at some point, someone has another chance to shoot Steffi or Farthington encountering her/him clad in the mascot suit. I like having to shoot without knowing who is inside the suit. Then, the shooter gets to remove the mask and we get to decide who is in there. I think it would be really cool to see the blood slowly diffusing through the foam face. I like it being someone relatively insignificant, perhaps the worker who supposedly was buried in the cement while building the Chrysler Freeway, which, by the way, Detroit is thinking of rebuilding or ripping out.

Now, going way back, it may turn out that Steffi was not just a young co-ed who got corrupted and then destroyed her master, consuming and assuming his powers in the process. Again, could it be that "hers is the hand that holds the apple" and that, as she siphons away Farthington's powers, she has to prop him up, splicing into his lectures material from her own childhood, a childhood that included killing her own grandparents with apples.

A Cute Deus Ex Machina for a Light-Hearted Musical

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

Will enters the tunnels intending to shoot Farthington

Somehow I blanked on the idea of Will shooting Steffi!

Okay, here are some brainstorms. I'm not attached to any:

1. Maybe Steffi is also a foil to Will. Maybe she was in the record industry, clawing her way to the top, and she and Will had an affair that resulted in the destruction of one of Arthur's albums and a total betrayal of Arthur.  Years later, she surfaces in the cult (seems typical for Hollywood types) and claws her way to the top of that.
2. Maybe Will enters the tunnels intending to shoot Farthington, but while he is pointing the gun at him, Farthington is shot in the back and falls, revealing Steffi, and Will shoots her.
3. Maybe it's ambiguous who gets shot. Maybe in the present day, we find that Steffi is unharmed but that Farthington is a prisoner in her home.  He's on life support, but the machinery could just as well be sucking life out of him and feeding it to her. There would be a parallel here with Farthington and Arthur.
4. Maybe Steffi isn't such a siren when Will and Steffi have the original affair. Maybe she tries to advance Arthur's career through the cult in a way that parallels what Will tried to do for him through the Detroit scene and subsequent move to L.A. Maybe when Will shoots Farthington, he has no idea that she is standing behind him, and he shoots both of them with one bullet. If she is the woman behind the sea devil's mask, she is bent on destroying Will.

At any rate, when Will shuts down the Lazarus/White project, he does so in part to protect himself. He needs to go off the grid and can only do that if he pulls Arthur off the grid. Also, he's just resigned to the idea that Arthur cannot be made a star.

Will's gone from being a hard-working son of an immigrant who finds hope in the American dream to a monster. Also, one of his big hesitations about supporting Arthur's comeback in the present day is that some cult members might reemerge and come after him or expose him. When he finally goes for it, his is proven right: Farthington (or whoever is behind the sea devil's mask) reemerges.

I really don't know where that story line goes!

I think I had a vision at one point about Will thinking he had killed Farthington, going to trial for it, and then several other victims of Farthington who thought that they had killed him coming forward. We find out that Farthington's M.O. is to make people think that he died, then he comes back with a new name and re-runs the scam with newly-named cults. If he goes to jail, he has to sign back all the rights to everything.

That seems kind of stupid right now, though, and Steffi nullifies that ending, anyway.  It's a cute deus et machina for a light-hearted musical, which I think was the original context.

Who knows! Originally, Will was the closest thing the story had to a major villain. Then it was Farthington. Now it's Steffi. So we have three major villains; really more like 2 and 1/2, since Will is a tragic hero ready to repent and seek redemption in his old age, and an honorable son working hard to help his brother in his early life. Farthington has always been a vacuum, a black hole.  Steffi could change over time as in Scenario #4, or she could just be the siren of Scenario #1.

Speaking of Campbellian ways of viewing women...

Tragic Hero is the Best Option Left

Leda, Zeus, Helen, Clytemnestra, Castor, and Pollux

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 16 June 2014.

As you know, I have the same problem as you do.

I want to convince you of one difference: we have made that tendency of ours part of the project itself. Please read this post by Bob Lefsetz. I can't help but think we are the exact people he is describing here.

Now, no one wants to be the one who goes on one of those singing shows and finds out for the first time in their lives this shocking fact: "I am not only not going to make it but I am also absolutely terrible. The difference between that and us is the total lack of consciousness. Consciousness does seem to be a prerequisite for art, although there may be some counterexamples, like Neil Young for instance.

Of course, all this rationalization is the kind of thing that the protagonist does before being dragged back down into the chorus, back into the primordial, dithyrambic dance. Maybe we have nothing that individuates us from this formless mass of wannabes who refuse to accept their role as "consumers as opposed to creators" (Lefsetz).

We've been talking a lot about Death of a Salesman lately. While not my all-time favorite, the play (and its companion editorial for the New York Times!) is somewhat prophetic of this era in which virtual reality becomes more real than real reality (cf. McLuhan and Baudrillard).

Imagine if Willy had all the tools of the virtual age at his disposal; how much more quickly might he lose touch with reality and plunge headlong toward his demise!

For better or worse, ours is an age where the common man is seized more than ever with a "total compulsion to evaluate himself justly" (Miller). Rightly or wrongly, many in our society believe they have greatness within them, that they must be famous. We have huge, outsized ideas of ourselves and our place in the larger scheme of things.

But before we despair of our quixotic ambitions, consider that this is the very heroism that Arthur Miller thought should be accessible to the common man.

Arthur Miller describes the hero's tragic flaw as "his inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status." As I drill into my students ad nauseam, Willy Loman is the hero of Death of a Salesman, not Charlie or Bernard as they often think! Many of them are stuck in a medieval morality play paradigm wherein a character's downfall = punishment for sin. Not so!

As Miller continues, "Only the passive, only those who accept their lot without active retaliation, are 'flawless.' Most of us are in that category."

So back to our little project. Do I need to explain to you the artistic imperative of building castles in the air (cf. The Master Builder, Thoreau)? We are using these electronic tools in the proper way: to achieve tragic status in the quickest possible way! C'mon now! What would Hilda Wangel say?!

Now, I want to assure you that I am working on the songs. I don't want you to think that there is no substance at all. But I'm intrigued with this idea of NOT building from the ground up. Starting on the ground is a challenge to my dignity. I start with the "image of my rightful status" and go from there!

And, no, this doesn't end well.

But I would much rather end up a tragic hero than a coward or villain or member of the chorus. I guess if I could have my druthers, I'd be an epic hero but, according to Hesiod, Zeus put an end to that age with Helen. Or maybe he already had the idea in mind with Leda.

Tragic hero is the best option left.

This Creepy Nihilistic Thing

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 May 2014.

Plot-wise, I feel like the Farthington stuff is really coming together.

Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld

The problem I'm seeing is that it has in some ways crowded out the stories of Joe Lazarus, Arthur White's Brand New Life, and Will Witkowski. I don't want to undo any of the Farthington stuff; it's really good. I just want to figure out how to revise and reinsert a few things it has eclipsed.

Originally (and I think we disagreed on this one a bit), I really loved the idea that at some point, Arthur came really close to making the sort of music he was born to make. I saw Brand New Life being the first step in that process and an escape with Joe Lazarus being the closest he came to fulfilling it. Before Farthington, Will was the nemesis who crushed Arthur right when he was about to become the artist he was supposed to become.

The Farthington plot eclipses all that in a lot of ways, so we've got to figure out how to give its impact back. I really don't want to lose the idea that, at some point, Arthur almost became the artist he could have been. He won't stand up as a protagonist if we never feel that he could have been great. At the same time, that feeling we develop is something to make suspect, as the bit of heaven Arthur can show people on earth is only a faint glimmer of what heaven has in store for us. We should be torn between the idea of loving the bit of heaven we see through Arthur and the lesser thing rooted in the American Dream, lamenting that Arthur could have "made it."

So, I don't want to touch the Farthington plotline.

I just want to make room for an Arthur who almost made it and wasn't just a victim; a Joe Lazarus who almost saved Arthur and was dashed by failure; a Will who is the flawed but protective brother who tries to save Arthur from Carlton Farthington; and a Brand New Life that for a period sets Arthur on a positive path.

Reasserting these ideas may complicate the story a bit, but if we're thinking of five TV seasons, we need several ups and downs and some squirminess in terms of how the audience reads the characters.

I don't yet have a clear picture of how to reintegrate these pieces, but my hunch is that after Will rescues Arthur from Farthington and gets him his first treatment, Joe Lazarus helps bring Arthur back to his true form; Will then works with Joe to put Brand New Life together; Will sees the initial success and starts doing a bunch of dumb commercial stuff in his eagerness to make Arthur a star; and the tension that creates between Will and Joe drives Arthur back into the predatory hands of Farthington, who validates Arthur's vision and lures him into the heroic quest to save Iceland.

Maybe after Will kills Farthington, we think he's a good guy looking out for his brother. But then he has Arthur committed until the money runs out, at which points he dumps him on Linda. So maybe what looks like Will's heroic quest actually ends up being this creepy nihilistic thing...more like the end of Thief starring James Caan and Tuesday Weld.

So Opposite of Facebook

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 29 May 2014.

I got caught up on the blog and I've enjoyed seeing it mixed up a little more with email excerpts, phone calls, and music.

"so antagonistic to the default settings of Facebook"

I like the idea of using fame as a way of protecting our stuff, but things like lists and memes are mostly what get reposted on Facebook. I'm happy to promote the blog on Facebook; that's super easy for me and I've done it a few times. But it doesn't have an easy point of entry for anybody trying to learn about the project. There's so much you need to know in order to follow any of it. That makes it ideal for elitist hipsters and intellectuals, but bad for drawing most people into the project.

That's not a criticism. I like the blog as it is, but that's because it's targeted to the three of us! I see it as being most useful as a chapbook, a repository of our ideas.

If we want it to be a tool that draws people into the project, we've got to simplify it and make it easy for people to enter the background of the story. That's not super appealing to me, though; it runs us into the problem of putting a lot of effort into things that aren't about developing the story. Right now, I see the best use of our time as developing the TV show and the music. The blog as it stands really helps me with the TV show by creating a type of greatest hits of our communications. I'll work at promoting it, though, because I'd love to see what happens with something so antagonistic to the default settings of Facebook. Maybe it's so opposite of Facebook that there's a place for it.

Fame could be a strategy to protect our content, but I'd like to still use some old fashioned legal approaches. I have a long tradition of half-writing pilots and movies and then either deciding they stink or solving all the problems in my head and losing interest.

In other words, huge dreams and very little attention to practical reality.

Catholic Art That Doesn't Suck (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 4 August 2012.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I totally agree with your feelings about the project. I have remarked to Sarah that something is providential about us meeting and things clicking so well. There's something here that seems sacramental, an outward sign of an inward grace. I'm pretty much sure of it, even if the project itself goes down in flames!

I also am intrigued about the possibility for postmodern Catholic art. I have a near total revulsion to Christian music. About the last Catholic thing I like is Gerard Manley Hopkins.

I do have thoughts about reconciling the complexity and I think you're hitting on it somewhat. Will is the one pushing the trashy, by-any-means-necessary approach--very much how some of Marvin Gaye's handlers were pushing him.

But, as in Marvin Gaye's situation, one of two things happened:

1. He wrote the desired style of song or album but somehow infused all the sex/disco/partying with transcendence/profundity or
2. He refused and wrote transcendent/profound music

Marvin Gaye

So, even the "woman" in the more sexy songs becomes like Petrarch's Laura or Dante's Beatrice, even rising to the level of a Song of Songs or the lover described at the beginning of St. John of the Cross's Dark Night of the Soul.  That is straight-up Catholic: bloody, sensual, sexual--in a word, incarnational. You won't find this on Christian radio.

I like the morality play idea, but I also think that these things play out more like an Aristotelian tragedy, with a hero--not a sinner--being the one who gets crushed. Maybe the sinner gets crushed too for good measure, but not in a way that is merely "edifying" for the observer.

Of course, the Christian world view brings a different dimension to this reality that Greeks first intuited. But the Greeks were more willing to let it be an ineffable, horror-inspiring experience, eschewing the pat "moral of the story" or last-minute deus ex machina in favor of speechless awe in the face of an inscrutable universe.

I think Catholics and Christians need to let God be ineffable and irreducible if we are to rise above the insipidity and irrelevance we've fallen into.  I can point to Catholic elements in just about all of the songs, mostly alloyed with the mundane and profane.  But, as a Catholic, I tend to be more okay with that than non-Catholic Christians, probably because we tend to be more in touch with the utter scandal of the Incarnation.

What I'm saying here may be heresy and I will recant it if shown the error of my ways. But I do think this is getting to the heart of what it would take to make Catholic music in the postmodern age.

Catholic Art That Doesn't Suck (Part 1 of 2)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 4 August 2012.

I've been thinking a lot lately about how much need there is for great Catholic art in this century.

For years I've been brainstorming band projects that are really morality plays. I think this project is much more complex than a morality play, but I do think we've got a chance at filling a huge void in the art world by doing something that uses the tropes of postmodernism in service of Catholicism.

I don't think any art critics realize that Catholic art is still happening.

I'm not sure there is much contemporary Catholic art that doesn't suck. I think a lot of it makes people who are ready to return to the Church run screaming. The 70's and 80's were a bad time for church and retreat center design, I tells ya.

We might actually be groundbreakers doing Catholic conceptual/performance art.  I know you've said in the past your art hasn't consistently been particularly Catholic, and neither has mine, but what are the odds that two devout Catholics, who are both teachers, artists, and alumni of the same university, would start collaborating when we did?

We had a thousand chances to make music together in college and it didn't happen once. And now it does? And why didn't all this incredible music you've been stockpiling for years take off earlier? It's certainly amazing stuff. It feels like we're being offered some grace here, and I feel like making the most of it.

I'm not saying let's be as obvious and abrasive as morality plays are. I think there's a universal appeal to the story. But I think the story does confront the problems of existence in the postmodern age and especially critiques the problem of American Catholics attempting to serve both secular society and the Kingdom of God. Arthur White probably would have found instant sainthood if he lived in the Middle Ages.

Maybe we can help reshape our culture to encourage sainthood. Maybe that's the whole idea behind getting everybody to contribute to this music.

The Comeback

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 22 December 2012.

The ending of Arthur White only works if it's comic, but there should be two tragic phases.

The first is Arthur succumbing to hubris, worshipping himself, and losing everything. The second is Will, through his best intentions, destroying Arthur.

I think we almost need to invent a new type of tragedy here...not tragedy of fate or tragedy of will but tragedy of culture...the culture of the American Dream. Of course, you've already pointed out Arthur Miller here. Just as a Willy Loman spared the American Dream would have been a talented and happy carpenter, an Arthur White spared the American Dream would have been a Therese of Lisieux.

Instead, he'll have to take the low road as a tortured, disfigured version of what he was made to be. I see the first round of tragedy as the anarchic individualism of the American Dream coming out of the sixties. I see the second round as the homogenizing effects of the American Dream of the mid-seventies and eighties.

I see Brand New Life as having two phases: a very happy, promising early phase, and then a convoluted mess phase...kind of like Love.

There have been something like 70 members of Love. There is the "real" Love from the first three albums (mediocre musicians who made great music), the second Love (outstanding musicians who made lame music), and then whomever Arthur Lee could find until he died. The last decent version was a group called Baby Lemonade who just did perfect covers of the original group's recordings.

I think Arthur White wants the right things out of life but finds little guidance until the early days of Brand New Life, which is full of fallen people on a path to redemption, like Joe Lazarus Sr.

Will thinks he wants the right things in life but doesn't. Still he pursues them like a faithful, disciplined soldier. Joe Jr. has no confidence in any sort of reality, and like Pilate asks, "What is Truth?" Agniesczka is a lioness who protects her kids first, then her husband; she is probably materialistic partly because she wants to protect her kids and partly because she's a little vain. Will isn't all that different: he likes to be known as his little brother's protector.

I see late-seventies Arthur being destroyed for doing the right things musically, and Will being a tragic figure for destroying something beautiful and holy out of a misguided faith in the American Dream.

The story of the last thirty years is that Arthur has pace been healing at a snail's pace, and, over the past year or so, has gotten to the point that he can play music again, recording it on cassette tapes in hopes of getting it to Joe Lazarus Sr.

It's a really sad, pathetic-seeming plan, but Arthur is responding to God's voice telling him to get this last album out to the public. He thinks Joe is the only one who will understand. Unfortunately, Joe is dead, which is even more pathetic. But God gets the tapes to Joe Jr., which can bring him healing and shape a new destiny for him.

For the past thirty years, Will has had to cope with Arthur.

At first, he had him committed so he wouldn't have to deal with him. Then he couldn't afford the bills, so his girlfriend, a nurse, said they could care for him at home. Will stuck her with him, and, as she cared for him, she was converted and left Will to join a convent. Will resented Arthur for that, but has seen the empty place his dream has led him to.  He's just about at that point where he is ready to admit his failures and repent. He just doesn't know how...

That's where the comeback comes in.

Eve vs. The New Eve

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 28 May 2014.

I want to keep talking about this idea of Steffi Humboldt.

The name Stephanie is a feminization of Stephen, which means "crowned one," literally "that which surrounds or encompasses"--that latter one being an even better meaning vis-à-vis our central motif. Humboldt sounds like "humbled," but actually means almost the opposite: "bold man." I don't want tightly symbolic names in this story, but I think this works on a number of levels.

Steffi could work as the Blessed Virgin Mary's primary foil in that she illustrates a distortion of the ideal. Mary is truly humble and, paradoxically, she is the crowned one; she also "surrounds and encompasses" in a much more definitive way. And she achieves this definitive transcendence without compromising or distorting her feminine genius (cf. St. John Paul the Great's Mulieris Dignatatem).

Steffi, as we've mentioned, takes the feminine sea deity/demon route to power. She overtakes, usurps, and cannibalizes (figuratively? literally?) Farthington. She emerges victorious over everyone: Will, Farthington, Arthur, and Joe Lazarus. She may have been the beast, or she could have been mauled/shot along with everyone else, usurping power later.

Or perhaps Will had the insight enough to recognize her true status. Maybe the moment just before or just after he shot her, like some kind of anagnorisis. Perhaps she is the one he went after and shot. Perhaps Will already knew her in some capacity. She could be the one who is now chapless, she could be the one in the costume. She could be the "top sail," meaning she is the one who captured all this wind/vanity and harnessed it to her own purposes. Although the name Humboldt suggests that she may have masculinized herself to achieve these ends, I don't think that's the main thing going on. Hers is a distorted/disordered femininity.

One problem that we have right now is that Farthington's "speeches" make reference to an apple orchard, which I think are fairly rare in Burma and Oxford.

"hers is the hand that holds the apple"

I'm wondering now if this memory could come from Steffi's childhood in Midwestern America! That might be a nice thing to pawn off as one of Farthington's discourses then have a moment when we see that hers is the hand that holds the apple. We could go even further at that point and say she viciously murdered her grandmother, stoning her to death with apples so to speak. Heck, we could throw Grandpa in for good measure. In that case, we may have a kind of "Eve vs. The New Eve" situation (cf. Adversus haereses).

The master stroke would be if we could arrange for Will to have some anagnorisis regarding Steffi. For some reason, I think it's some realization he has right before shooting her. Perhaps he sees some symbol or feature such that he realizes that she--not Farthington--is the one behind the curtain, that she is the one who has prevented him from keeping his promise.

Less sophisticated would be that he goes down into the tunnels and happens upon Steffi, maybe in some kind of half-beast form, feeding on an already-dead Farthington. She turns on Will and he merely shoots off her jaw in self defense.

Kind of cool, but not very Aristotelian.

Another Candidate for the Subterranean Beast?

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 23 May 2014.

Construction of Chrysler Freeway through Black Bottom

I never answered your question about the symbolism of cement combining liquid and solid to become very solid. It definitely works. That's the point for me that it starts to become a loose symbol, where the resonances become too many to enumerate.

I don't know if this ever happens in real life, but I still like the idea of someone being buried in the cement--maybe someone insignificant to the story like a worker (black? white?). But maybe someone significant, like Stan Witkowski himself.

I feel this could be a can of worms worth opening.

If it were a worker, that could have some interesting implications. If it were a black worker, is that somehow emblematic of Detroit in general, or at least of race relations leading up to and after the race riot in 1967?

Concrete is so richly symbolic with its connection to the auto industry, to Henry Ford's vision of a car for everyone, to white flight, to the economic and cultural desertification of Detroit, to the Nietzschean ramifications of a water-based material that becomes sculptural (kind of like an Apollonian power grab).

Other thoughts:

• Detroit's sprawl has created something like a red giant that may someday collapse into a black hole (cf. description of Carlton Farthington in "A Higher Order of Creation (Part 3 of 3)")
• Could this buried character be a yet another candidate for the subterranean beast Farthington encounters? (cf. "What Happens After Iceland?")
• I love this tidbit from the wikipedia entry on Black Bottom: "Historically, this area was the source of the River Savoyard, which was buried as a sewer in 1836" 
• Check out this video about Detroit's "ghost rivers," including the River Savoyard

Ill-Advised Arrangement of Cement

The following is excerpted from a 15 May 2014 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

What do you make of the Witkowski cement dynasty in this symbolism of land and water? We've got a substance that begins a liquid, becomes very solid, and washes all through Detroit, destroying neighborhoods and hastening Detroit's decline.

Art

I-75 and Ford Freeway Interchange in 1970, Detroit

Well, if they were involved in building the Chrysler Freeway (I-75 and I-375 through Detroit), they may have been the ones who paved over Black Bottom, originally named for its dark, fertile soil and for being the epicenter of black culture and music in the city of Detroit. 

This works out nearly perfectly for the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy, by the way. Black Bottom is totally chthonic/ Dionysian and the impulse to destroy and pave it over in the 1960s was totally olympian/Apollonian. 

It's a complicated issue, but this act really went a long way toward hobbling black culture (and culture in general) in the city of Detroit. From what I've heard, Detroit's particular way of complying with the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 more or less ensured that Detroit would never give its inhabitants an experience of true, vibrant urban living. That divided, piecemeal, culturally lifeless experience still persists to this day. And it's quite literally the ill-advised arrangement of cement that guarantees it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

This issue of race is an important one to bring up if our setting is Detroit. 

Isn't it interesting that Arthur White sings black music? Wouldn't it be interesting if his dad's company was the one who paved over Black Bottom? This all feeds into our motif of echoing or appropriating other people's content. Arthur White is not the real deal! Like all these other white wannabes--from Glenn Miller to the British Invasion to Michael McDonald to Rick Astley to Stevie Ray Vaughn to Eminem--no matter how good or bad they were, you have to feel more or less uncomfortable as you consider their success at parlaying another culture's riches into their own enrichment.

This is the exact subject I wanted to talk about next. We spent some time talking about the domination of men in our story--I think we need to continue with that, developing our female characters in the process. 

But no story about Detroit can be complete without a discussion of race.

Renaming

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014.

We've already mentioned that renaming is related to the theme of becoming one's true self (or not).

Let's categorize a little further and say that some characters did that in a good way, others in a bad way. Anyone who renamed themselves or was renamed for worldly purposes suffers a worldly demise. Anyone who renamed themselves such that they "might live for God" is saved. So, they can say with St. Paul (another renamed one) in Galatians 2:20:

I have been crucified with Christ; yet I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given himself up for me.

Conversion of St. Paul

This is again related to that fine line of being humbled, becoming nothing, losing one's identity, having it replaced and/or subsumed by something else. Something about that is necessary for us as human beings; we can't avoid undergoing that process.

Maybe it's some kind of nod to the nothingness whence we sprang.

Interestingly, the ones who try to stake a claim to permanence in this life are the ones who go down to the pit. Even Joe Lazarus, who only sought to solidify his sobriety by changing his last name, suffers this demise. Rather than living his recovery each day buoyed (note: water verb) by God's grace, he sought to make it an accomplishment, an achievement, a "done deal."

There's a lot that can happen with the motif of water here (as opposed to land, which is representative of the world, of ambition, of manifest destiny, of the American dream). We have to "put out into the deep" (Lk. 5:4). We need to be buried with him baptism (Col. 2:12). We also know that water is home to sea devils, Scylla, Charybdis, Leviathan. Interestingly, it is the agent of our salvation, but also commonly associated with utter destruction, as in Psalm 69.

Ultimately, it is the primordial chaos:

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind [ruah elohim] swept over the waters.  Then God said, "Let there be light." (Gen 1:1-3)

So, why does it continue to play a role--no, even more--a central role in our salvation? Why not have it be like Marduk: he splits the female water deity in two and that's the end of it? There's something in this crux that reveals the truth of the Christian religion, the very thing that makes its genius superior to all that have come before or since. After that, of course, God names some stuff. Then he allows his greatest creature, man, do the same. Haven't we put all that water in the rearview? And if not, why not?

Short answer: our God is an awesome God.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014.

I like the Scylla/Circe idea...but why not Charybdis? That's an even more blatant cunnic/yonic symbol (okay, can I get my head out of the gutter?).

In some ways, Mary exhibits not only woman par excellence, but mankind par excellence.  And what does she exhibit? Well, something that is germane to our recent topic: becoming nothing in a good or bad way.

We can safely and securely look to Mary as the model for the good, nay, preeminent way of becoming nothing. In one way, she is merely a paragon of humility, the vessel in which God becomes incarnate. Yet she is given to utter the Magnificat. Aside from that, her only message--echoed down through the centuries--is "do whatever he tells you" (Jn. 2:5). She "ponders all these things in her heart" (Lk. 2:19). Like Carlton Farthington, she has no content of her own; she echoes, contemplates, or makes manifest the content of others. But in her case, the only one held within her frame--within the ribs of her proscenium, so to speak--is the Almighty, the ground of all being.

Carlton Farthington exhibits the bad version of becoming nothing.

Cut off from the ground of his being, he seeks to appropriate the being of others. He seeks to be the outer frame, the last arch in the proscenium, the maelstrom that draws in and envelops the existence of others. This, as I've pointed out before, leads to the near nothingness of Hell. Losing all inner integrity, he eventually implodes. Like a collapsed sun at the center of a black hole, he becomes hyper-massive, infinitesimal, concentrated and trapped within himself along with all the other damned ones who have drifted across his "event horizon." Nothing, not even the remaining light within him, can muster the velocity to escape the gravitational field that results.

Could this role be played like a woman? She would basically be a Charybdis at that point. Smacks a little of adolescent, Kerouacian misogyny. I think your second email suggests that maybe he should remain a man and that Mary is the heroine of the entire story. She manages to do what we all were made to do. Everyone else does it in distorted ways. Some of those ways can be rerouted or redeemed.

Others lead direct to damnation.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 2 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

It seems like we also have a few women who have to deal with families and faith in the face of spacey, absentee dads.

We can stretch those issues of women who deal with abandonment problems further if we think of Linda and Will, since Linda, instead of getting kids and a family with Will, gets an alcoholic who won't marry her and saddles her with caring for Arthur. We also might have Steffi, who has to tend to all of Farthington's "children," becoming him in that process.

I don't have the words for this yet, but maybe the thematic issue we're running into here is a sort of fallen vision of heaven, that somehow in the male mindset there is a failure to be present in grace.

Maybe men see their visions of their personal heavens as being utopian escapes...freedoms from work for which a man must work really hard. The resulting patterns are obsession and abandonment, where the female characters live in the moment more and engage with people as they are. Heaven isn't a far-off destination with an entrance fee of hard work and the reward of irresponsibility; it's an eternal moment, eternal presence, eternal relationship. We're in it now in the sense that an unborn child is in the world.

A few other thoughts. There are few female tragic heroes. I think that's because hubris is more of a male thing. The order of creation grows from simple to complex, not that either word can do justice to God's creation.

The most like God comes last, and that is the woman.

The only person born without sin after the fall who isn't Jesus is a woman. I really do believe women are a higher order of creation than men are. Look at the way Jesus treats men compared to women.

There are no female "whitewashed tombs" (Mt. 23:27).

I don't think there is a single encounter in the gospels when the few harsh words he has for a woman don't end with a sweet, loving relationship and conversion on the woman's part.  Few of the encounters with men end that way.  The men want to fight to protect Jesus, to kill him, to discredit him, to learn his tricks, to run away. Men generally want to know what to do where women want to know what to be in the gospels.

I love St. Dismas, the good thief, because he sees himself and Christ clearly while the other thief is ticked at his own and Jesus' inability to change reality. He wants an escape plan, both literally and existentially. It's that typical male pattern of obsession and abandonment: work hard to escape. He wants to do, where St. Dismas wants to be, and he consequently enters Heaven before the apostles, if "before" can be spoken of in Heaven.

The last thought: I am a big fan of T.S. Eliot's "Journey of the Magi," especially that second to last stanza in which all sorts of images from the story of Jesus' life are scattered randomly in the background of the magi's quest, decontextualized and just part of the existential fabric of a life's mission.  A similar thing is happening with The Odyssey in Mad Men: characters are floating in and out of the story. It's not so much a retelling or recontextualizing of The Odyssey as it is a concept that life is The Odyssey and we're all living different and even conflicting aspects of it all the time.

Eliot's "

So these two texts are really informing my approach to archetype and keep me from worrying too much about stereotype and cliche.

A Higher Order of Creation (Part 1 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 May 2014.

Circe Invidiosa by Waterhouse

I see your point.  I like the Steffi idea, especially since it's a twist and TV needs twist, but archetypically, she could easily default to a Scylla/Circe figure.  Not that I mind that.

I see a lot of promise in Agnieczka as a character...we just haven't talked about her much because of her loose connection to an ex of yours and partially because of the awkwardness that happens if you play Arthur White and have to have a relationship with an actress. The problem goes away if we pursue the TV show option and don't play the parts ourselves.

Linda is a heroic figure, but she's kind of saved by Arthur, which lends her to a few stereotypes...the redeemed fallen woman Mary Magdalene type, which again, is not a huge problem for me since the men are fairly archetypical, too.  I'm not on a quest to eliminate archetype...I don't think any of us are.  I think we just want to sharpen the archetypes.  Archetypes are really useful for helping people process truth...they just fail when they are presented in a hackneyed manner, unless the point is farce.

Arthur's parents are interesting contrasts. There's probably that problem of the Victorian thing where the wife is the moral head of the household and the dad is the economic head, but I do like the idea in which Arthur's mother's ambitions toward heaven rival and even outstrip his father's economic ambitions.

The big female character you left out is the Virgin Mary. In my eyes, the whole story is about Arthur's relationship with Mary...she's the central figure of his mystical connection to heaven.

In so many ways, Arthur lives in a feminine world, and there's a little bit of a feminist undertone I see in the way that Will and Farthington's aggressive masculinity screws so much up, and if the world could accept Arthur on his own terms instead of trying to butch him up and measure his music in terms of money, it would be a much better place. It's not that Arthur is effeminate...it's that the world can only recognize his gifts--creativity, intuition, love, a profound appreciation of beauty, a life-giving disposition--in feminine terms. Really, though, they are divine.

The idea of Steffi adds an interesting spin on maleness.

One other crazy idea: Joe Lazarus, Jr.  could be Josie Lazarus. Sorry, Joe! But really, there's your female on a heroic quest if we just change his gender.

3-D White Guys

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will on 14 May 2014. 

"native and indued unto that element"

You know, as I'm looking at our pictures, I'm realizing that we don't have many well-developed women written into this story.  There's The Woman in the Sweet World; Lena, Will and Arthur's mom; Agnieszka, Arthur's wife; Linda, Will's girlfriend in the later years...

This concern comes out of my AP English class where I noticed that most of our tragedies consist of a 3-D white guy suffering against the 2-D backdrop of non-white and non-male characters. I wonder if it would make sense to develop a convincing Virginia Wolff- or Simone de Beauvoir-type character, who, maybe just by her presence, satirizes the seriousness of what is going on with these self-important men. I'm having a real hard time imagining who it could be, but I think that shows just shows my narrow-mindedness.

The same narrow-mindedness that had the original (female) teacher of the class choose all books that are by white men, about white men.

The "stage" is already crowded with men angling to be the tragic hero. One thought is that current-day Carlton is Oberlin student/cult member Steffi Humboldt. In that case, Carlton Farthington did die and only appears in public dressed as the mascot. Steffi is the one who has taken over all of his material, including the material that he appropriated from Arthur White and Will. Maybe Steffi has some connection to Arthur that she would want to appropriate him, taking him into herself as it were, and bringing forth new life (okay that's problematic, but I'm trying here!).

But it does make sense to me that she or some other woman could be the sea devil. It might be interesting if we were able to write an entire story for her, where our story becomes just one small part of her universe. Unfortunately, my mind can only envision her having an Ophelia/Edna Pontellier/Virginia Wolff-type demise: she walks back into that element to which she is "native and indued." I suck.

Have a great day!

High Meadow vs. River/Ocean

Okkervil River's Will Sheff

I think this Don Henley vs. Okkervil River and Frank Ocean brouhaha might be a good discussion.

Don Henley is all protagonist, all individuation, all tragic hero, all rules and rationality, imposing these Apollonian concepts on the fathomless swamp from which inspiration arises.

Okkervil River and Frank Ocean are all union, all chorus, all lawlessness and inspiration in their clearly Dionysian interpretation of music's origin and destiny.

Both want to deny the right of the other.

Without River/Ocean, Henley dries up.  Without Henley, well...

This generation of artists is much more comfortable with never being a "star" in the sense that flourished in mid- to late-20th century.

In some ways, they win because they know what Henley represents and they don't want any part of it.

Frank Ocean

One of Henley's arguments is "Would you want someone doing that to your work?" And I honestly think that River/Ocean's answer to that question is "We don't care."

They might go on to say, "I am part of this formless flow of music and I would rather have access to it, wherever it flows, than to divert it into my own narrow channels, into my walled villa, and use it to irrigate some classical garden with well trimmed rows and marble statues" (okay, it's pretty unlikely they would say something like that--especially in unison).

Do we need this lawless period to drag these ossified baby boomer protagonists back into the mire whence they came? I thought our generation was the one who finally got out from under that shadow. But this generation are the ones who are finally doing the really dirty, bloody work, ushering in an era of "anarchy and collapse" (McLuhan) so that the culture can renew itself and new genius emerge.

Henley (second from right) was an outlaw once too

The baby boomers had such a powerful dose of the Dionysian...it's so ironic that they are engaged in these kinds of battles. River/Ocean may be wrong, but it's true that they are part of the more primordial, foundational reality in music. And Henley isn't wrong. In his words, though, you hear a kind of measured language not spoken by people who are still tapped into the dark, formless, chthonic source of music. Can't take him to court about that, but can you speak that way and still write songs? When did their last big song come out? 2004?

River/Ocean's? Probably yesterday.

I guess the upshot of all this is how it all relates to our own concerns about copyright. Now, I would have a much bigger problem with someone stealing our stuff if it were some kind of monster corporation (I will always love you, King Ad-Rock), not River/Ocean. So, I'm not saying there isn't a "standing up to the man" component of this impulse that could better harmonize with the artistic impulse. But this trend that Henley is trying to beat back may, in fact, be the Zeitgeist.

And, as Hegel claims, "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit."

The History of Arthur White: The Sweet World

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 2 January 2013.

In the early seventies, music was evolving at a rapid pace, and both Arthur and Will understood that Arthur White and The Five Wits' brand of hard-rocking Motown covers were too old-fashioned.

Arthur was heavily influenced by the new directions of Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield. Will just knew it was time for something new, and that the Five Wits weren't the right vehicle for Arthur's songwriting anyways. Luckily, the other Wits were off to college or were too busy with their assembly line jobs and wished Arthur luck. Arthur and Will put out ads and assembled the new group, which they both decided they should call The Sweet World of Arthur White. Arthur liked the name because all he had ever wanted to do was tell the story of The Sweet World, which still occupied his dreams even if it wasn't as vibrant as it used to be. Will liked the name because it was a big middle finger to everyone who had ever messed with his brother, and because it capitalized on the success of the Arthur White brand.

The Sweet World combined Arthur's Motown influences with psychedelic and folk elements plus Arthur's mystical lyrics. The band was a huge local smash and Will made getting the band to California, cutting a demo, and getting signed a one-year goal. Will worked hard on this goal and succeeded, but he did so with a type of single-mindedness that kept him from being an empathetic brother. The more the band worked, the more Arthur lost his mystical connection to the real Sweet World. That, coupled with the loss of his mother, led him to get married too early to Agniesczka, a childhood friend  Arthur reconnected with on tour.

Unfortunately, Arthur idealized her for the child she used to be, just as he idealized his own childhood as a way of retreating from the miseries of middle school. One night Arthur touched a woman during one of the Sweet World's more intense numbers, and she had a mystical experience that unnerved him. Will made Arthur make touching a woman's cheek and singing directly to her part of the act, and the sexual-mystical-spiritual confusion that resulted terrified Arthur and also drove him to an early marriage so that he could stay chaste if not celibate.

On top of all that, The Sweet World wasn't like the Five Wits: it hadn't evolved out of the friendship of neighborhood buddies and family members, but out of a search for great players. Those great players brought a lot of habits with them that kept Arthur distant from them. He was always afraid of guys because of the bullying and never was very good at making friends with them and, on top of that, it seemed like the only way to spend time with the guys on their terms was to chase girls and party. By the time the first album was recorded, Arthur was in a steady pattern of running from the band to Will, from Will to Agniesczka and the kids, from Agniesczka and the kids into prayer, from prayer into songwriting, and so on.  Every part of Arthur's life attracted him and terrified him, every part was sanctuary and cause to flee.

Then, a bunch of horrible stuff happened all at once.