Making Things Twee

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 5 December 2015.

The gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks

Making things twee is exactly right. That's the most recent version of emasculation (and I would say defemination). It was even worse in the 90's when indie was dominated by shoe gazing, voice cracking twee men. I don't have any problem with these kinds of twee or elfen men, in fact, I loved a lot of these bands. I also lump the comics of Daniel Clowes in with this whole wonderful era of the subterranean 90's.

Long story short, there is such a thing as an elfen man. I love me a twee elfen man.

So, I shouldn't say it was worse. But there wasn't any place for a more virile expression. And as my voice got progressively lower and my outsized immigrant features began to assert themselves, I realized that I would never be a part of this era of elfen hairlessness.

On to the topic at hand. Will, I think there's no way the sisters would put Woody "in quotes" (I just put that in quotes, fighting fire with fire so to speak). And they would never "let capitalism do the rest." They would never be allied with capitalism in that way.

I see Woody as a robust force of nature just like the Savage Sisters and similarly endangered by the likes of Don Gilber. I think James Vernor locked him in his basement when he went off to fight in the Civil War. Woody probably blundered in there from the subterranean tunnels and fell asleep. As a pharmacist, Vernor spent the entire war dreaming up a concoction that would progressively cause the wild man in his basement to diminish. Upon return, he subjected him to a regimen that resulted in the gnome-like creature whose pee tastes like ginger ale aged in oaken casks.

I say true muliebrity doesn't feel need to ridicule or diminish virility. Of course, being a pagan force of nature means you do all sorts of things—cast spells, dismember, flay, cannibalize, castrate, etc.—but all in good fun. It would have absolutely nothing in common with modern movements that seem to think suppression and belittlement and detribalizing can somehow replace the riotous harmonies of pagan life (see modern concerns about Grimm's Fairy tales). How about acknowledging the awesomeness of forces beyond our comprehension? We can't do that intellectually, only ritually, only symbolically, only poetically, only artistically, only through music. The Protestant/Enlightenment approach doesn't have the necessary scaffolding to wade into those realities. Just like when Adrienne Rich becomes too topical, her poetry starts to suck. No value judgment on her politics, it just sucks poetically. That's problem with the Protestant/Enlightenment approach in a nutshell.

Having mowed down all its hedges, this approach doesn't have any means for channeling the archetypal herds, keeping wolves and monsters at bay, etc.

*    *    *

On a totally different subject, after all these years, that is literally the first ICP song I have ever knowingly heard. I had a roommate in college who had a whole group of friends that were active members of this group, one who was a wrestler in their WWF-style wrestling matches. With hardly any knowledge about the group whatsoever, I have to confess a kind of admiration for them. It fit my expectation that the video you sent has been viewed tens of millions of times and has more thumbs down than thumbs up. But, truly in this case, haters gonna hate. More people love Eminem than hate him. More people love Taylor Swift than hate her. These guys can literally say that more people hate them than love them, but, since that comes from a pool of millions of people, they actually have an extremely large fan base, one that has a cult-like devotion to them and their many spin-off enterprises.

Deliciously Different!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to Will and the group on 3 December 2015.

Woody has mellowed over the years

That's funny, I didn't realize he was just a gnome. From the beard up, he looks like your traditional wild man of the woods character. If he is a gnome, could it be that he was once a virile wild man—a huge hairy, bearded dude with gnashing molars and thunderous laughter? Perhaps his diminishment is due to that modern process by which we become caricatured, eviscerated, emasculated, defeminated versions of ourselves, suitable only for branding purposes. This could be a kind of Robert Bly, Iron John, men's movement type thing, but not limited to men only. Just the idea that there's no room for that sort of pagan spirit in a Socratic, Alexandrian, rationalistic, deterministic, positivist, empiricist, consumerist, materialist, materialistic society.

I don't think the Savage Sisters would have done this to Woody. No one so clearly secure in their own identity/muliebrity would do this to another. I don't know, maybe they would, but in a spirit of mischief, not malice. Of course, part of the reason they don't rain arrows down on Arthur is his feminine qualities (see "A Distinctly Feminine Attack on History" and "Frolicsome Fawn-Like Movements"). But more than anything else, Arthur is childlike, not unmanly. He's just a different kind of spirit—not the wild man type, but some other unadulterated expression. I would think that the Savage Sisters would recognize that same essence in Woody, even while keeping a safe distance and even battling with him from time to time. Of course, they might turn him into a gnome, but that's just par-for-the-course paganism. Even dismembering him wouldn't be that big of a deal. He'd probably be laughing and bellowing through the whole thing. Like them, he is unhistorical. This isn't Don Gilber.

Probably James Vernor did this to him, trying to sanitize and sell wild man urine!

The Vernor's Dude

The following is an excerpt of a 3 December 2015 email exchange between Will, Art, and the group.

Woody the Gnome

Will:

I'm also up for the traveling notebook and the zine. 

Also, I think the Savage Sisters of Shakespeare should be our project's version of two other Detroit staples: GLOW (the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling) and Juggalos. By our version, I mean probably not much like those things at all. But Faygo should be involved. 

Also, somehow I thought the Benefactor morphed into Leif Erickson's sister....that the Benefactor was the Lodestone keeper. For Art, he's the person who ruins the project by funding it, either in real life or in the story. For me, he or she ruined America by funding it with the lodestone's power. 

I think besides Victoria Woolf's being a Freudian slip on my part, she is in my eyes what Steffi becomes when she absorbs the power of the lodestone and the life force of Leif Erikson's sister, who may or may not be The Benefactor or both. 

Also, I think we've got the postmodern revival of the allegory of the cave going on here, with the return to paganism and the arches within arches. And of course, the actual cave.

Art:

How about the Vernor's dude? Could be a new character. Some kind of archetypal figure from Detroit's version of the Schwarzwald. I see him being some sort of pagan figure who gets dismembered or eats children, but is sanitized and repurposed as Vernor's logo.

Will:

I love it. I think a Rumpelstiltskin-type approach would work. I think that any Icelandic magical creatures who end up in the salt mines with Leif Erikson's sister should be refugees from the patriarchical structure of Germanic myth. That means this gnome has somehow fled to be nestled in the lap of a very powerful and wise gynocracy (which was just autocorrected into "gyro crazy," which means we must be talking about the caves under Greektown). 

So I'm thinking his story has to be a strange permutation of the traditional child eater/mischief maker/imp thing. What sort of gnome would the SSS keep for a lapdog, and how would the story morph into bringing the gift of Vernor's to Detroit? What is an Icelandic Pan who enjoys subservience to women all about? Is he the Mordred of the Arthur White universe? 

Also, how much of this salt mine world does he see? Does he see it in dreams? Can he ever distinguish any of it from mystical visions? And as a fairy tale percolates under the city, how does it shape Childe Arthur?

Cartography of the Mind (Part 9 of 17)

The following are excerpts of an illuminated book sent from Liza to the group. As usual, we publish typed excerpts of these along with the original photo. The best way is to read the text, of course, is to to experience it in its illuminated form.

addressing darkness & light through inquiry & reflection

I felt that
I had
stepped
through a
door that had
been usu-
ally left open
to discover trem
endous treasures
there these
treasures terrified
me I told myself
that I could turn aro
und and go. And then I
walked on.

I am wondering...

1. Have the Benefactor and Leif Erikson's Sister become one character?
2. If not, what is their relationship to one another? To the Savage Sisters or Shakespeare (= the Icelandic Wyrd Sisters?)? To Victoria Woolf?
3. Are each of the above ultimately a different name for the same thing?
4. If so, is that thing Paganism (aka Christianity's sister religion)?
5. What is the overarching role of (myth+) paganism's resurgence within the context of this project?* (My deductions on #5 to follow my questioning...)

6. I'm a bit confused about the Benefactor's intentions...Is the Benefactor a Redeemer, a Destroyer, or both? Initially, I thought the horror raps had been written to illuminate the world's darkness, so to speak as though by carving the hallowed history into Detroit's original and unchanging rock, (s)he was ultimately giving a voice to the oppression and corruption that plagued the Benefactor's remembered world since conception. So, in the context of the story, I categorized the Benefactor as the Storyteller: (S)he's survived through many lifetimes. Outlasted history and embraced as an ageless androgynous (turn page) elder who's etched our story out into the stone for us, perhaps as a warning. In a sense, I viewed the cave as the axis mundi; as people's tunnel to Christ by way of Pagan myth. Of course a story demands an audience, but it was my assumption that despite the Benefactor's use of the Lodestone to lure people to the underworld to hear of the redemptive horrors, we were complacent in our world; we had no desire to be stirred out of this complacency, no desire to confront harsh truths, no yearning to grow deep like roots. In yet another sense, I viewed the Benefactor as Will views the French: as a protector of America's pieces we'd rather dispose of until the moment we're finally ready to grasp their value. From my current understanding, however, the Benefactor is, in fact, "nefarious"; (s)he is destroying our history through total inaccessibility to it. To revisit Will's message on storytelling, the Benefactor is ultimately rendering his/her survival meaningless—and in turn ours—by forgoing creation a total destructive collapse of all history. Though allowing us access into the cave would "make us what we are," his/her selfish isolation makes us what we were never intended to be: greedy, gluttonous, selfish, alienated, miserable, the most dangerous city in America for the third year in a row, and ultimately doomed. Am I getting warm? If the Benefactor is "nefarious," it would seem that my interpretation of paganism's role in this project is incorrect, or partially at least. My most recent deductions, from piecing together bits and pieces from past e-mails and blog posts are that this project both embraces paganism as a bridge to the "myth become fact" aka Christianity and discredits paganism for leading us to Christianity through a vehicle other than Christ. In the context of the e-mails, the Benefactor = Graham Greene's lieutenant, in that any potential triumphs will be empty failures; any truth the Benefactor arrives at without Christ is not truth at all, but mere shadows of shadows of shadows. Further, the Benefactor is not evangelizing. While (s)he may know better than anyone the limits of our physical world ("The Most Authentic Critiquers"), (s)he does not draw others toward the beauty of God. Instead (s)he, quite literally, repels people from it. AM I GETTING WARMER?

Yah Mo Be There

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 27 July 2015.



I have a few more questions that I feel are somewhat final or definitive.

One of the main questions that I've had with the project is whether it is acceptable to introduce yet another rigidly white male tragic hero/philosophical subject to the stage? And, if so, under what conditions is that acceptable or appropriate?

The old struggle against the black backdrop, whether that blackness be oblivion or an actual nonwhite, nonmale cast of thousands. And the recent gambit of "humiliated thought" is a poor excuse for letting another one up on stage. Sartre and Camus were able to get a lot of mileage out of that one (not to mention hooking up with a lot of women way more attractive than they--which may, after all, be the whole point, cf. the whole history of rock and roll).

Is it not rather the case that he should vacate the stage?

He who has supposedly always known his own name and patrilineage, yet has strangely needed to appropriate everyone else's identity as his backdrop and basis.

Have we unconsciously reincarnated this wandering mongrel?

Is this just the old Aristotelian formula that requires the hero to be of a noble or illustrious family, the reason being that it "universalizes" the horror?

Or is this just another aspect of the turbulent reversals? That it isn't appropriate for a hero with no background or basis to be up on stage. In music we've talked about this at length: from Michael McDonald to Justin Timberlake, we've agreed that this is at the very least problematic. We don't need another Oedipus, even if he, like Camus, is able to bear the horror rather than blind himself. We don't need another Hamlet, another Kurtz, another Willy, another Meursault. Screw all of them, myself included.

By seeking to become everything, these figures have become nothing.

I guess a related question would be, do we need to formalize his departure toward Avalon, his disappearance, his entrance into oblivion?

My knee jerk answer is no, he should just leave.

This figure has not built his "castle in the air;" he has built it on the subjugation and objectification of others, on the appropriation of riches--first material, then cultural. Ironically, and as Liza has pointed out somewhere, this has caused him to diminish, to dwindle away to nothing like Kurtz. I would argue that it has paradoxically strengthened the identities of those who have had their cultures subjugated, devalued, usurped, appropriated, and suppressed, such that we are on the cusp of a massive reversal, one which McLuhan (white male--sorry) feared might be violently and overtly suppressed.

We have to look at what we're doing here. Will, you've said you want us to sharpen the clichés and I think it's safe to say that we've not only sharpened them, but also narrowed the field of clichés down to the most essential ones. That's why we're arriving at King Arthur, at Detroit and Iceland, at Dan Gilbert and the Savage Sisters, at the Underachieving Detroit Hipster Guy. That's why our gaze has been drawn inexorably toward black holes, lodestones, hearts of whiteness.

We are brewing up something that should soon be recognizably apocalyptic. We're slouching toward Bethlehem, straining toward Armageddon.

Straining to be worthy of some summit or summative statement: Is is what's being? But is that straining toward summation, that need to unify and universalize all the data of existence, itself the weapon with which Western man has used to subjugate the whole world?

Or is this all just, as Baudrillard might say, the final strategy, that of effacing oneself before the other in order to resuscitate and universalize one's own moribund, degenerate principles (in this case, those of liberalism)?

Quicken Ye Loa(dsto)n(e)s While Ye May, Mr. Gilber

The following is an excerpt of a 23 June 2015 exchange between Art, Liza, and the group.

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

"Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

Quicken Ye Loa(dsto)n(e)s While Ye May, Mr. Gilber by Liza Polaskey

Art:

I'm wondering if the thousands of blog views on July 20 is a fluke and not Dan Gilbert's henchmen and web crawlers. 

Liza, are you in trouble with this guy? Are we in trouble with this guy? 

You said you were going to explain what the deal was with him and his "anti-democratic bullies." Given that probably half our readership is rabid Spartans who probably would like to believe in their richest, most powerful alumnus of all time, we should be ready to state our case, which I know little or nothing about. Of course, Gilbert's devotion to Cleveland and Draymond Green being a Golden State Warrior probably complicates the matter somewhat. 

Still, I'm wondering if we've triggered something like the Tulpa Theory here and, if so, are you and your sisters ready with your bows and arrows?

Liza:

Interesting. I may be mostly silent in the days preceding Saturday on account of an intensive Detroit Public Library commission, but I'll ponder the above as I work this evening. I'll also set aside some time to (way belatedly) scan my handwritten response to a foregone thread that slightly touches on Gilbert's personification of anti-democratic tendencies. If I've not sent it by 11 this evening, feel free to badger me and remind me of my promise. When I'm working in the flow, my temporal experience is greatly distorted and I lose grips on most everything else (including but by no means limited to: promises, time, space, basic human necessities and interactions). A simple, "Yoo-hoo, Liza, come back to earth..." shall probably suffice.  

I use personify in place of another word as I'm fairly convinced Gilbert is not a real human, but rather some sort of evolved virtual embryo with an advanced sensory connection to our reality. Somewhere along the way, however, he lost all contact to this reality due mostly in part to his immersive business model. His representation therefore not only precedes his reality, but it also produces his reality. Dun dun duuuun! 

Welcome to the third order of simulation, Detroit.  

Coming soon to a city near you...

The Living Arrow

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Art to the group on 28 May 2015.



I love the idea of Arthur as the "living arrow" in the sisters' quiver.

Probably unrelated, but I picked up The Once and Future King this morning and turned to this exchange between Lancelot and Arthur:

"We don't see many arrows thrilling in people's hearts nowadays," remarked Lancelot one afternoon at the archery butts.

"Thrilling!" exclaimed Arthur. "What a splendid word to describe an arrow vibrating, just after it has hit!" Lancelot said: "I heard it in a ballad." They went away and sat in an arbour, from which they could watch the young people practising their shots.

"It is true," said the King gloomily. "We don't get much of the old fighting in these decadent days."

I also like the arrow verses at the end of Kahlil Gibran's "Your Children":

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

I think what you wrote could be a key to the puzzle: "To [the Savage Sisters], this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.  To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game."

ECT, originally intended to make Arthur more shallow and thus more profitable, ended up turning him back into a child. This is God's unlikely triumph and perhaps a model for how a decadent society will not just incrementally improve (i.e. "the pendulum swinging back") but be utterly transformed by grace. And the reason why this victory is so unexpected and definitive is that it utilizes on the enemy's own arsenal. Just as he gloats over Christ crucified, the king of this world doesn't realize that--in crushing humanity's soul--he unwittingly catapulted it into definitive glory.

The Once and Future Child

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group 28 May 2015.

Dan Gilbert

Returning back to Arthur as representation of the children of the world for a moment, I see Arthur as the perfect foil for Farthington. As is perhaps the point.

On one hand, we have Farthington who is a sum of humanity, in a sense. However, he seems to represent the waste of abundance. Having no content of his own, his identity is constructed externally through his reposting, retweeting, and recycling. He's turning other people's intellectual commodities into garbage disguised as a commodity. While he's done no work of his own, he gets all of the worldly gain. Sounds like a lot of people I know.

On the other hand, we have Arthur. Similar to Farthington, Arthur too is merely a sum of all that is around him.  However, he seems to represent the abundance of waste.  Perhaps, as with all children, Arthur is even more moldable and bendable than Farthington. The difference between the two men is that Farthington externalizes the world around him with closed eyes while Arthur internalizes this world with the wide-eyes of a child.

I guess this makes him Arthur White: The Once and Future Child.

Just as Gilbert and other anti-democratic bullies want to exploit the children, Gilbert has plans to exploit Arthur whom he views as small, unimportant, and vulnerable. To Gilbert, Arthur has a purity that must be taken advantage of; he has a trust of fellow man that must be manipulated. So, of course, it only makes sense that the savage sisters, with their fierce motherly instincts, take Arthur in and protect him as though their own child. Seeing no threat in such a small and gentle being, Gilbert's doubt in Arthur is the catalyst for the crumbling of his empire.

Too bad for him. So it goes, Don Gilbert.

Or perhaps in exiting the inner-world and immersing himself once again into the outer-world, Arthur chalks his vision up to a hallucinatory side-effect of some pills some doctor makes him take to make him less crazy. Or, better yet, in telling his vision to his brother and Farthington, they force him to undergo more ECT. Though he sometimes has dreamlike flashbacks of his visit to this inner-world, the majority of his time there is shocked from his brain.

So it goes, Arthur White.

Frolicsome Fawn-Like Movements

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Liza to the group on 28 May 2015.

Ophelia by John Everett Millais

On the relationship between the savage sisters and Arthur White:

I agree--it seems an effective plot point for the sisters to take Arthur under their pixie sprite wings. Perhaps they interpret his ignorance of Farthington’s evil scheming as an innocence and purity seldom seen in man. To them, this is to have triumphed over society’s corruption of the child.

To them, this is to have slaughtered society at its own game.

Picture, if you will: the savage siren sisters lure Arthur in with their song. As with all invasive species to their natural habitat, the sisters’ intent is to destroy him before he, like his fellow outer-world inhabitants, desecrates the sanctity of their enchanted inner-world. Little do they know at this point, Arthur is not like his fellow man. Yet still, the sisters gleefully watch him disappear into the murky depths of their river.

While all who fell before him had ferociously struggled against the river’s current, however, Arthur neither flails nor flops. Instead, he placidly sinks to the bottom of the water, as though inanimate. There is no fight at all. Bewildered, one of the sister instinctively dives into the river to rescue this enigmatic creature from nature’s grasp. Perhaps, in this moment, she sees Arthur’s innate ability to remain calm amidst the struggle as a trait worthy of protecting from the looming dangers beneath the river’s surface. Or perhaps she sees Arthur’s lack of basic survival instincts as childlike and innocent. Though she herself is not immune to these dangers, like any mother would, she places the safety of this man-child over the safety of herself.

Such a scene reminds me of that moment in Grahame Greene's The Quiet American when Fowler says of Pyle, "That was my first instinct--to protect him. It never occurred to me to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm."

Arthur, though, is far from dumb. Though deemed insane in the outer-world, this reflects more on the type of society that interprets his childlike wonder as craziness than it does on Arthur. Far from dumb themselves, the sisters are able to interpret this wonder of Arthur's as brilliance and therefore worthy of redemption. They see the woundedness in his wide, blank stare and are dazzled by it. Maybe they even see parts of themselves in Arthur, whose every action in this strange land radiates with the saintly glow of his mother. Maybe in the sisters' gaze Arthur sees parts of his mother reflected back at him (and therefore parts of himself).

Upon pulling a calm Arthur from the torrential waters, the sisters soon discover that, much like themselves, Arthur has no fear of the depths. Instead, his (and the sisters') deepest fear is of shallow living.

Or perhaps after pulling Arthur out of the river, the sisters also discover that he was not lured by their song after all. A song that until this moment no man has been immune to. Like Farthington's evil deeds, Arthur was oblivious to their seduction. In this scenario, maybe he instead fell into the water while bending down to bask in the marvelous fragrance of the flowers growing along the shore. Maybe the flowers are the same flowers from that Hamtramck garden, the flowers that he once tended to with great care alongside his mother. Or perhaps they remind him of the flowers he used to pick to adorn the Virgin Mary statue outside of his childhood church. Whatever the case, Arthur feels like he's made his way back home, to the world he inhabited as a child. Though this childlike awe is the source of much of Arthur’s woes in the outer-world, in this inner-world it is this exact wonder that protects him from all potential dangers.

Another possible scenario is that Arthur doesn’t fall into the water at all. Maybe, instead, the sisters draw back their bows because of his reverence toward their world, his delicate demeanor, his frolicsome fawn-like movements. Perhaps, while standing alongside the riverside admiring the beauty, a band of misfit animals gather around him mistaking Arthur as one of their own. Catching a reflection of their world’s natural beauty through Arthur’s eyes, the sisters become certain that his intent is pure and his heart is full.

It is in this moment, perhaps, when the sisters realize that Arthur is the living arrow they've been searching for. He is the ultimate ammunition in their war versus man, in their ongoing battle with Gilbert. If this be so, then the sisters themselves are the weapons--they are the bows. (Take that, societal objectification of women's bodies for pleasure and enjoyment!) If Arthur as the arrow is the sisters' greatest hope for humanity, the sisters then are not only the bow that holds him but also the shield that guards him. They are his protection against humanity.

To borrow from Kahlil Gibran's poem "On Children,"

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you. 

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday. 

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.

This could eventually tie into Steffi shooting Farthington in the tunnels. Is Steffi a direct descendant of the sisters? Are they the ones who taught her to shoot?  In her angsty teen years did she rebel against their savagery with a savagery all her own? Is she the fallen angel who forms her own kingdom? Or, maybe, Steffi is still one of the sisters. In becoming a follower of Farthington's (and seducing him along the way) she is able to learn all of his secrets and ultimately destroy him. Perhaps this was the initial plan, but maybe somewhere along the way she began believing the lies. She falls under Carlton's spell, seeking his garbage to fill the emptiness symptomatic of life's cruelty outside of the enchanted forest. In doing so, she betrays her sisters by falling victim to mortal temptation.

Or does she? Maybe Arthur is not the ultimate Christ figure in this story.

Maybe Steffi is.

The Savage Sisters (Part 2 of 2)

The following is an excerpt from an email sent from Art to the group on 23 May 2015.

Diana, The Huntress by Guillaume Seignac

I like them being friendly with Arthur. Like maybe he stumbled onto their 100s of acres compound in Detroit, which usually means immediate death or disappearance. But just as the Savage Sisters are drawing their bows, Steffi calls them off since Arthur, though himself allied with Farthington at one point, really had no idea what was going on.

Could we have her dispatch some of her Savage Sisters as bodyguards against Dan Gilbert, who sees the catatonic Arthur as his key to claiming the lodestone for himself and his own adopted city, Cleveland (which, as we all know, wishes it were Rock City). All part of the immortal, apocalyptic battle between Michigan (the best state ever) and Ohio (the worst state ever).

I love the idea of a straight-show with the band surrounded by 4 or 5 Savage Sisters looking distrustfully out at the audience for the entire time with bows and arrows at the ready.

In some ways this is looking a lot like the episode from Morte d'Arthur in which Lancelot gets shot in the buttock by the huntress:

...a lady dwelt in that forest, and she was a great huntress, and daily she used to hunt, and ever she bare her bow with her; and no men went never with her, but always women...So it happed this lady the huntress had abated her dog for the bow at a barren hind, and so this barren hind took the flight over hedges and woods.  And ever this lady and part of her women costed the hind, and checked it by the noise of the hounds, to have met with the hind at some water; and so it happed, the hind came to the well whereas Sir Launcelot was sleeping and slumbering.  And so when the hind came to the well, for heat she went to soil, and there she lay a great while; and the dog came after, and umbecast about, for she had lost the very perfect feute of the hind.  Right so came that lady the huntress, that knew by the dog that she had, that the hind was at the soil in that well; and there she came stiffly and found the hind, and she put a broad arrow in her bow, and shot at the hind, and over-shot the hind; and so by misfortune the arrow smote Sir Launcelot in the thick of the buttock, over the barbs.  When Sir Launcelot felt himself so hurt, he hurled up woodly, and saw the lady that had smitten him.  And when he saw she was a woman, he said thus: Lady or damosel, what that thou be, in an evil time bear ye a bow; the devil made you a shooter.