Roll Over, Beefoven

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 September 2014.

"Chuck Berry 1971" by Universal Attractions (management) - eBay item photo front photo back. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Bystanders playing roles, cover songs, digital auditions to join the group, possibly secretly authorized by Steffi Humboldt as Dr. Farthington...that could be pretty funny.

It actually might be a way to have a contemporary Concert for Iceland. Maybe it all appears to be arranged by the Arthur White camp. Maybe we could bring back the idea of Augustine White. Maybe he, some web winners, and the angry remnants of the original Sweet World use a new Concert for Iceland as revenge against Arthur.

I've also been thinking about the lost storyline of the original Sweet World trapped in Japan, Arthur's kids, and Rystyy Kryyztyylz (sic).

We have some generational juxtaposition going on with Carlton vs. Steffi (the 70's cult becomes the Internet) and the two generations of Joe Lazari.

But it would be fun since we have the Witkowskis as the problematic American nuclear family to deal with the Whites as the deconstructed postmodern family. (There might also be an opportunity to contrast musicians "back when music meant something" to the technicians of today).

Anyway, I'm into this notion that the original Sweet World lives to spite Arthur but isn't quite bright enough or resourceful enough to do so, and that Augustine is basically bent on revenge, too, which leads to Concert for Iceland II featuring A. White and the Original Sweet World. I also like the idea that two members of The Sweet World form Beefoven with Rystyy Kryyztyylz and later change their appearances to join the cult and the band Apotheosis, not out of love for Farthington but to plot revenge against Arthur. Perhaps Arthur never even knew their names in The Sweet World.

Also, I'd be really happy if Beefoven's album were called Roll Over.

The Concert for Iceland

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and Joe on 12 March 2014.

Catastrophic eruptions in Iceland

I want to see if I can help hammer out the Iceland story a bit.  Remember that in our "more commodious" frame, this may just be one story among many, not the least of which being our own story: three guys trying to make rock music past our prime (well, not you Joe).

My hope is that this doesn't sound absolutely, utterly insane.

Here goes:

1. Sometime during his Asian odyssey, Arthur falls in with Carlton Farthington
2. Will, seeing his brother sinking deeper into a dangerous cult, manages to get Arthur home again: disaster averted (for the time being)
3. From America, Arthur begins campaigning to have Farthington brought to the states
4. Farthington, who had never considered the idea, becomes personally interested
5. With his Oxford doctorate, Farthington actually receives permission to run a summer pilot program at a Midwestern university on the topic of "multidimensional learning"
6. Long story short, the program devolves into spending a lot of time down in the university's steam tunnels trying to find an entrance to the underworld
7. Arthur is ecstatic about this development; for the sake of the story, however, he needs to be occupied such that he is unable to be with Farthington that summer
8. Meanwhile, catastrophic eruptions occur in Iceland; Farthington begins talking to his students/followers and Arthur about mounting a humanitarian campaign
9. Plans are made for "The Concert for Iceland"; Rustyy Kryystyylz, famed guitarist of the band Beefoven, is contacted and promptly becomes a cult member (he's a little ditzy)
10. Will, in a last ditch effort to save everything that he has worked for, is able to have Arthur committed to a sanitarium and zapped
11. Around the same time, Farthington's pilot program goes horribly wrong with university officials pulling the plug; Farthington and his handful of students/followers get mangled and/or killed by some unknown beast in the steam tunnels beneath the school
12. Arthur is catatonic; Farthington may or may not be dead (spoiler alert: not)
13. Some years after the fact (circa 2014?) buzz originating from an online source begins circling: the Concert for Iceland will finally happen!
14. But the status of just about every participant in the project is in doubt: Isn't Arthur still catatonic? Wasn't Farthington was among the mangled dead found in the steam tunnels? Isn't Rustyy Kryystyylz just a washed-up has-been? And where is Will Witkowski? (Not like he would have been in the benefit band)
15. As time goes on, clues emerge that the online source is none other than Carlton Farthington; after all, his cult involved a "novitiate" whereby novices would forfeit all identifying information and artifacts about themselves--the online source (a blog) indeed seems to be a "clearinghouse" for this kind of material
16. The blog builds to the point that actualization seems imminent.  Posts reveal increasing focus, productivity, and purpose...

What happens?

• The Concert for Iceland: The "original" imagined concert (leave it to the audience to decide whether it actually did happen or this is a figment of someone's imagination) OR
• A "Second-Chance" Concert for Iceland: The original never happened; this occurs long after the fact with a bunch of washed-up has-beens seeking redemption OR
• Karaoke Tour of Arthur White and Rustyy Kryystyylz: This may lead to the "Second-Chance" Concert once people realize who these two losers are OR
• Joe Lazarus Jr.'s Crusade: Joe finds Arthur and leads a campaign to win back the rights to Arthur's material à la The Artist Formerly Known As Prince re-recording and re-releasing all the old material (although it wouldn't need to take that exact form)

Other fun facts:

• Carlton Farthington, if he is still alive, is now ensconced in an entirely electronic identity.  He lives through the blog, websites, online voicemail, text-to-speech software, and speech-to-text transcription.  One of the more disturbing developments is Carlton's "spoken" synthetic messages that begin surfacing around this time, leading to two interpretations: (1) Carlton is dead and someone else is creating these transmissions or (2) he was severely mangled, likely losing the parts of his face and mouth used for speaking and now pulling the strings using these electronic tools.  In some ways, it's the old Star Wars theme of how evil makes one less human ("He's more machine now than man"). And, yes, this wholly electronic existence is meant to be a reflection of the plight of modern man in general.
• Carlton Farthington's real reason for wanting to go to Iceland had to do with an arcane theory that melting ice from the volcanic eruptions will cool the lava, opening up caverns that go down to the center of the earth, safe haven from all the "turbulent reversals" he thought imminent. Complicating matters, he believed that live dinosaurs--both frozen in the ice and living in the warm subterranean caves--would be released at precisely this moment (he considered this one of the less dramatic aspects of the "turbulent reversals," which he theorized would ultimately result in a "new physics").  The humanitarian concert was a front for this agenda.