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?

The Return of Joe Lazarus Jr.

The following is an excerpt of a 15 November 2016 email exchange. 

Philosopher Charles Taylor teaches on secularization at the University of Tübingen, June 4, 2013.

Will:

Look who's back! 

It's Joe, aka Joe Lazarus, Jr! 

Say hello to the whole crew—Allison, aka The Critic; Liza, aka Leif Erikson's sister; Nick, aka Nick, Art, aka Arthur White and Carlton Farthington, and Max, aka Joe Lazari III-X.

Art:

JOE!!! YAY!!! IT'S JOE!!! HURRAY!!! JOE!!!

Max:

There is no curse after all!!!

Joe:

Damn good to be back. 

From the looks of it, not much has changed on our email thread since I left: careful meta-analyses of our methods and goals interspersed with allusions to abstruse Theorists with a capital T, both real and imagined. And then there's the Will/Plato vs. Art/Aristotle debate. Have the tables turned on that one? Three years ago, I thought Will was more the Aristotelian.   

One thing I frankly can't remember: which Joe Lazarus am I? Am I just Jr? Or Sr., as well? It looks like Max plays every human being I have contributed to producing, either as father, grand father, or great-grand father. Are we that far in the story?   

Also, as I recall, I was very much a lapsed Catholic for the majority of this narrative. At least, I remember the first blog post I wrote was about my anger over the spiritual bankruptcy of both my biological mother and of Holy Mother Church. I was bitter, but I can't recall why. Clearly I have a ton to catch up on. Will and Art, can you forward me some recent threads?   

At any rate, I do remember that my character was caught up in a kind of spiritual malaise, a kind of modern dark night of the soul for which dawn is not necessarily imminent. Did he return to Catholicism with Art? What brought him back, if so?   

I've been reading a ton of Charles Taylor, whose intellectual history of secularization is on point. Will be useful.   

Also, regarding the footage of our concert that you probably think is long gone. Well, it isn't. I told Will this, but I should say to Art and Max: I apologize for falling completely off the grid for a year or two, and taking the footage with me. I hit a few bumps in the road and resigned from life for a while. Interestingly, I did this only after I went East, to India. Didn't Art become reclusive after he went East? Or just insane? 

Anyway, I'm convinced I can salvage the majority of the footage we have from before. My attempt to make a documentary was a failure (after watching it, my film prof, a trusted friend, put her hand on my back and said, "You know, Joe, maybe you should stick with writing." I laughed, then cried a little). Then again, I can see now I really did not have enough material for a coherent narrative. Perhaps we can take up the documentary project again one day, or on and off through the years. 

Anyway, glad to be back on board.

Protecting American Art from Americans

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 14 November 2015.

National march in remembrance of Charlie Hebdo attack

I read the attacks as nihilistic, too. I don't see any virtue asserted—maybe just some happiness that people are dead.

Paris has a long history of letting American ideas that Americans can't handle percolate. When Screamin' Jay Hawkins put all that racist and xenophobic stuff into his art, he was exorcising it. To see him in the early 90's when campuses were moving in the PC direction that has led to a culture of censorship in the name of avoiding micro-agressions was very interesting. He showed everyone is buffoonish stereotypes and put everyone on the same field that way—it alienated the left and right equally. France gave him a place to work in a time when America wouldn't give him work. It did the same for the American ex-pat writers in the 20's, James Baldwin, the great jazz artists of the 50's and 60's, etc.

I'm not saying Screamin' Jay Hawkins is the height of Western Culture, but Paris is one of the great protectors of Western Art, and our art is one of the best things we have. I didn't actually hear about Charlie Hebdo until this morning, so I wasn't writing in response to their losses. Charlie Hebdo is/was an obnoxiously offensive magazine, but an argument could be made that it holds a space open for free speech by pushing it's boundaries. In general, I think Paris has been invaluable in helping protecting American art from Americans.

One of my big fears is not the loss of faith in God, but the loss of faith in people.

Le Banane!

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 November 2015.

Screamin' Jay Hawkins performs in Switzerland

I haven't been to Paris since the early 90's, but my one trip there had quite an impact on me.

I saw Screamin' Jay Hawkins with my parents at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Club, which was simultaneously glorious and awkward. My parents were trying to take me out for a cultural evening because they knew how much I loved jazz, and instead we got Screamin' Jay Hawkins in a tie-dyed tuxedo belting Constipation Blues. He put a bone in his nose and sang, "It's hard being a man/Being all alone/I ain't got a woman/But I got a bone!" Then he did an extended version of "I Love Paris" that included unflattering impersonations of every ethnicity in the world. One of his kids was on drums. The French treated him like a hero.

I loved the Louvre and the Pompidou Centre. Outside of the Pompidou Centre, I saw a guy play a surrealist drum set made out of a back rack, a bunch of junk, and a banana hanging from a string. He'd hit the banana like a crash cymbal and yell, "Le Banane!" That guy was a huge influence on me. Paris is a city of international creativity, and the idea of terrorists going after the fans of soccer, a game that creates international goodwill through mostly friendly rivalry, and the fans of American music, which has always been valued in Paris, frequently when America itself has dismissed it, just intensifies the death toll in my heart.

The terrorists aren't just killing people—they aiming for some of the best parts of Western Culture.

The Story of Making the Story

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 14 November 2015.

Steview Wonder

In general, I'm all for getting the music out to people as quickly as possible, and I'm less worried about it being flawless as you have been at times. I think of Stevie Wonder's music. Almost all of it is brilliant and beautifully executed, but he still leaves little mistakes and happy accidents in it all the time.

They are hard to notice because he's so fantastic, but Music from My Mind through Songs in the Key of Life all have little problems like sticks hitting microphones, spontaneous laughter, vocal bends into the right note, timing issues on the hi hat or drum fills that are close enough but not on, etc.  I'd also say that he has a mix of timeless songs and songs that are really stuck in their eras (although some of the ones that are stuck make me yearn for the old era—unlike The Secret Life of Plants and In Square Circle, which still are important albums but a little cringeworthy in how fully of their eras they are).

I think through it all, Stevie prioritized getting the songs out over perfecting them. There are all these stories of him telling lyric writers to write a few verses and they'd agonize for months, and then they'd show up in the studio really happy with the lyrics they made and he'd say great! I need a fourth verse in two minutes. A Time to Love and Conversation: Peace are great albums and A Time to Love especially captures some of the 70's magic, but his albums aren't quite as magical when he takes ten years to work on them. Of course, in those periods he tours like crazy and his concerts are fantastic, which supports the idea that it's better to be up and doing than planning and organizing. Don't wait for the all the necessary pieces to align.

One concern with the recording in terms of the storytelling—that is, the only medium we've found for telling the story is the blog, which tells the story of making the story, not the story itself.  I'm wondering about a Will Witkowski podcast that uses a visit from an artist who has been inspired by Arthur White, a song, and a call and/or performance from Arthur White as a counterpoint to the blog.

It still wouldn't tell the story of Arthur White from start to finish, but it could tell a different short story each week from at least three vantage points: the fans', Will's, and Arthur's. Between music, the blog, and the podcast, we'd have three avenues for telling what part of the story we can without the pressure of creating a series of complete, unified texts.

The Global Village is Too Large

The following is an excerpt of an 10 November 2015 email exchange between Art and Will.

Art:

McLuhan considered cultures with non-alphabetic languages, like the Chinese, to still be tribal. Alphabetic characters are, by the their very nature, devoid of meaning. Emojis show a return to non-alphabetic literacies. Memes are a similar development. The ascendancy of the Chinese and other cultures less removed from their tribal roots is another sign of the times. We shouldn't misinterpret the seeming uptick in oppression of these groups as a counterargument. It's a sign of a weakening, a waning. 

But I think it's more helpful to imagine this as the formation of one conflict-ridden tribe rather than the proliferation of many warring ones. That latter phenomenon I chalk up to the last gasps of the print paradigm. 

Then again, Ghengis Khan and Mao killed about 14 million a piece.

Will:

It makes sense that Steffi would see the possibility of the Internet making the whole world one tribe/cult. I think the reason the one tribe idea limps, though, and I'm pretty sure I'm taking this from McLuhan, is that the global village is too large for people to feel the intimacy of the global village. We can't have a multibillion-person village that works like a 300-person village. I can find my network of 300 like-minded people, though. 

You are right that he saw the electronic age as easternizing the west and westernizing the east. A thing that makes McLuhan misleading is that he tried to remove his feelings about technological advancement from his inventories. He wanted to say how things worked, not whether they were good or bad. In general, though, he preferred print culture to electronic culture. That didn't keep him from examining the dangers and benefits of both. In general, he said he was against all change, and that he wasn't an optimist or a pessimist but an apocalist—his hope was in the end of the world.

The Lodestone

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 9 November 2015.

I've been trying to deal with how inordinately white our story of Detroit is, and I think I gained some insight into the Lodestone. Reading Beowulf again has helped.

In the days of Scandinavian warriors, the tribes believed in the same gods and the same code. They sang of each other in their songs. Still, they were at war. Why? It would be easy to point to blood feuds and what not, but I say the Lodestone.

The Lodestone tribalizes people, makes life us vs. them. At the end of Beowulf, Beowulf has to fight a monster who is guilty of the worst abuses of warrior culture—it marauds mercilessly in the dark, it exacts too harsh a price in vengeance, it obliterates, it hoards, and it honors no loyalties.

In fighting the dragon, Beowulf dies in a sense for the sins of his culture. I can see Leif's sister on a similar quest. She understands that the Lodestone pits tribe against tribe and risks her own life trying to bury it deep within the earth's core, surpassing Beowulf in bravery by fighting furry dinosaurs along the way. Somewhere along the journey, though, she goes from being like the tribeless man who buried the treasure that the dragon made his nest to the dragon itself. She hoards the Lodestone in the caves of Detroit, disturbed only every few decades by people drawn to the stone's power.

The tribalistic effect of the stone accelerates the American myths of The Law of the Jungle and Social Darwinism. The Lodestone makes Henry Ford create Inkster for black workers and Dearborn for white workers—it tribalizes and spurs conflict and misunderstanding. This lodestone causes uneasy alliances that break into wars, like union conflict and Ford's horizontal monopoly approach to business, so that even peace fuels conflict.

The result on the Witkowskis is that even though they see themselves as enemies of racism and feel solidarity with those who suffer or yearn for better lives, they also "class off." Stan's exposure to the Lodestone causes the Chrysler and the Lodge, which is an unknowing act of tribal warfare. His view of himself as a self-made man makes him like Scyld Scyfing and his descendants like Hrothgars.

Will lacks the empathy skills to put human beings above the acquisition of wealth, power, and fame, and Arthur seeks out a cult to compensate for his inability to break past his princely obligations to the Witkowski tribe. He yearns for a universal brotherhood and sisterhood that the Lodestone works to prevent, and the misexpression of that desire is the cult membership.

There is a motif of very long delays in the fulfillment of quests in our story. The longest of these delays is the Benefactor's.

Those Who Sow in Tears

The following is an excerpt of a 31 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

St. Paul in Prison by Rembrandt

Will:

The podcast my friends Russ and Fred run has a structure that could work for us.  Basically, Russ tells the story of the inspiration behind one of his songs and then plays the song.  We could run a similar structure: Legends of Arthur White, in which we tell a story about Arthur that May or may not be true and end with a song from the era we address.  The whole, "correct" story could be told in another medium, and a podcast could go in multiple contradictory directions without any issues.

Art:

I noticed that; that's a really good idea.  

I feel too hampered, hobbled, hindered to accomplish that (or anything beyond emails and practicing songs with Francis). I'm not enjoying my small sharing in the swaddled/crucified existence right now. Half wishing the Benefactor could make all of this go away. But I'm sure Paul and John the Baptist and so many other heroes of the faith felt the same when they were imprisoned, their lives and voice snuffed out. But as Paul writes us from his prison cell: "Nothing can separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus." 

I'm having a hard time believing this, both with teaching and with this project (Psalm 126:5-6): 

Those who sow in tears
shall reap with cries of joy 

Those who go forth weeping,
carrying sacks of seed,
Will return with cries of joy,
carrying their bundled sheaves.
will reap with cries of joy.  

I feel like I'm sowing in tears; I just don't believe the second part. Help my unbelief! 

I'm not sure what you were imagining with the podcast, but if you were able to create and host the show (along with the theme music, bumpers, etc.), you could actually just run the whole thing. 

What about having guests on who would learn the songs, possibly bringing their own interpretive flair, and play them up in T.C.? Then, you could call me on the phone (there are ways to set this up for podcasts) and see what I thought. When appropriate, you and I could provide some background about the song and it's meaning. I could just be myself or I could get into the Arthur White role. I could also play the song from my home, either instead of or in addition to the other person performing it. 

Alternatively, we could discuss some of the story lines. But I still like the idea of me being only a relatively small part of the show.

Will Will

The following is an excerpt of an October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Will:

In all our messing with nomenclature and in all my years living with my own name, we've never thought of "Will" as a future helping verb.

Art:

How about when Farthington can't control Will he creates a clone of him called Will Will (helping and main verb). Maybe this is what is in Steffi's womb, although I'd always imagined that one being female (perhaps male/female monozygotic twins?). Maybe this is another reason a raging Will follows Farthington into the tunnels. Modernity enthrones the enfeebled will at the center of its moral law. 

Will should only be a helping verb; modernity tries to make it both helping and main verb. 

One of the twins dies. Does the other become the inarticulate monster?

Will:

So, I am conflicted on the saline avenger. 

My pro is that terrible topics are important to cover, especially in a project that seems to be a mock grand unifying theory of postmodernisty. 

My con is that for some reason, I have never lost my faith in the idea that at some point, this story will actually take some conventional narrative form and be told, and at that point, the saline avenger, if we aren't completely past the tipping point of holding an audience already, completely dumps us over. I know I've always said I want to work within the influence of a morality play, but I still like shaded, complex, mimetic characters. I worry that we keep flattening out everybody. 

Who knows. But there's no reason why Will Will can't just be a girl, who I suppose leaves the cryptic message "WILL WILL" in blood on walls.

Art:

Pulled in two opposite directions then... 

You want our narrative to take a more conventional form (a flattening, rationalizing, dehumanizing impulse). Your original, Everyman-inspired allegorical impulses might be classed with this as well. Deus ex machina too. 

But you also want nuanced, mimetic, irreducible characters (a deepening, irrationalizing, humanizing impulse). 

We've defined postmodernism the synthesis of these two. One way we've conceptualized it is clear, straightforward narratives told by unreliable narrators! 

Is that scaffolding robust enough? 

Carrie, the Stephen King movie, is great for this. All the nuance of modernity is finally judged by a pre-modern God, who is PISSED OFF. It's one of the most dialectically satisfying moments in film. Similar to the tension in Antigone between the younger Olympian gods of Creon and the older chthonic gods of Antigone. Hilarity ensues when the older gods wake up from their slumber and get pissed off by all the silly modern antics for which they have no context, understanding, or compassion! 

Although it's a piss-poor movie, the scene in Prometheus where the Weyland wakes up the engineer gives a similar pleasure: old gods waking up and KILLING EVERYONE!!!

A Terrible Beauty

The following is an excerpt of a 28 October 2015 email exchange between Will and Art.

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller at the April in Paris Ball 1957

Will:

I guess another way of putting my concern is that I want the story to be beautiful and uplifting.

Art:

I understand that, but this probably goes along with my Aristotelian/Millerian preference for tragedy. I find works with a clear moral valence—or, worse, an "inspirational" intent—NOT beautiful. Isn't the human being endeavoring against the black backdrop, against impossible odds, beautiful enough? Isn't it the case that the black backdrop provides the occasion for his beauty to shine forth? Isn't this the most inspiring of all pictures, the one that calls us forth out from complacency, blinking in the cold wind of the world? 

I see you as the protagonist, trying to assert your story, to build your foundationless castle. It's like what King Arthur tried to do. But we've found that it only exists as "once" and "future." It only exists in the telling or, better yet, the singing of it. I'm the one who provides that black backdrop most of the time, the chorus roaring moira. You're the hero who needs to keep building, believing, setting things aright, even as you sink down into the morass.

Will:

In your version of Miller, I think Biff has cancer from smoking without his shirt on, got raped in jail, and had his leg ripped off by a vengeful cow and is ashamed of his homemade robotic prosthesis.

Art:

That's so much better than Death of a Salesman. Hold the presses!

Will:

Another way of putting it—Yeats called tragedy a terrible beauty, not terror. The struggle against the black backdrop unites the hero to truth, hopefully...not terror. Good comes from the hero's fall, a messenger survives to tell the tale, and order is restored to the kingdom. If people just get stabbed in the neck no matter what they do, the message is that the universe is blind terror, and Aristotle denounces the art. The movie O comes to mind, in which the writer and director messed with Othello a little too much, undermined the tragic conventions, and created nihilism instead of tragedy.

Let's Work in Cat Videos

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 24 October 2015.

Noam Chomsky

Bill Gates-era education theory is very Skinnerian.  It also is about turning the kids into unformatted operating systems—I suppose the Internet and their jobs are supposed to format them. Also, teachers are being trained to be interchangeable parts. I'm not sure why the digital age relies on business-age strategies for learning, digital-age strategies for formatting, and industrial-age strategies for teacher training. I suppose the industrial leanings for teachers are about planned obsolescence—a deliberate attempt to make us irrelevant.

Which is why Prinicipal Skinner is named Skinner, but we are in the era of Skinner 2 after a brief flirtation with the idea that young people have souls, that education isn't just about making students into functioning members of the economy, and that the liberal arts are good for people. Any lesson plans that work in that direction are now dismissed as being part of a Crayola classroom.

Chomsky would say that serving up Fox News or Harbaugh is the same thing: reinforcing corporate competition and loyalty.

And yes, I think this is what the lodestone does. Is the American Dream just inarticulate rage? Perhaps first against nature, and then against society, and then against the self. First, you dig through the earth and fist-fight some furry dinosaurs, then you live in the salt mines turning a nice city and some nice farm land into an industrial battlefield, and then you get so sick of it all you let Steffi Humboldt steal your power. Sounds about right.

It struck me the other day that our obsession with cat videos is a sign of our pain.  Cat videos are the real opium of the masses! So let's work in cat videos.

Antonin Scalia

The following is an email exchange that occurred between Art, Will, Allison, and the group on 14 September 2015.

Antonin Scalia

Art:

Wow, I was actually contemplating the End of Arthur White what with the insanity of the new year and foreseeable future. So fascinating that whenever I've seriously contemplated that something like this happens. Yes, go for it, by all means. Will, I assume you can coordinate that as it develops, right?

Will:

Sure thing..I'll arrange interviews when necessary. Times two on the school year! It's taking a while to get my feet on the ground! I'm sure Liza's struggles are more impressive than ours, and that Allison's potentially lead to higher pay, which makes them more attractive!

I am currently without a school-issued computer, but the recording is a high priority in my life. I'm just dreaming about it more than working on it. For an INTP, dreaming is work. 

Nick is one of Joe's best friends. It's funny how the hole Joe left keeps sucking new people in, and what forms they take, like the clone of Joe Lazarus or the mystery Boston journalist.

Allison:

Indeed, the potential for higher pay makes my struggles incredibly more satisfying. I am keeping up with your emails—though my thoughts are usually full of language that is beyond comprehension for our art. It seems like Farthington writes most law school texts: manifestations of mutual assent? appearance of agency? traditional notions of justice and fair play? antonin scalia? 

I commend all the music making, and think that sharing the process through the blog is such a generous exposure to a process that is usually so full of self-deprecation, or at least, it would be if it be analogously paired with writing. As a person who has zero musical inclination aside from listening to and appreciating a wide variety of music, I hope my lack of contributions recently have allowed the more musical and less philosophical aspects of our art to flourish. 

Balance is something foreign to me except when I'm dancing. 

Law school is treating me justly. There's lots of free food to make up for the pain.

Will:

Free food?!  Nobody told me about the free food when I was picking careers!

New Development

The following is a Facebook correspondence between Nick and Will from 9 September 2015.

Tom Wolfe

Nick:

Hey Mr. J, how are you doing? I've got a question for you, and an opportunity, I think. In short, I've been trying to crack my way into some form of journalism & I've managed to get a music column at this alt-monthly in Boston and my publisher said it's sort of a local gig but it can be a "you should be listening to this" deal too. And seeing as how I continue and enjoy following Arthur White and the blogs, I thought it might be cool to somehow project Arthur onto a major American city. Let me know what you think—and also, in the spirit of keeping myself busy writing, I'd love to contribute to the blogs if you guys want or need another voice there. Hope everything is going well in Traverse!

Will:

Hey Nick! Thanks for thinking of us! Sounds fantastic! Let me know how you'd like to proceed!

Nick:

You can tell me what you think about this, but my idea was to enter the world of Arthur White as a Tom Wolfe-esque character who emerges with stories about the days he followed them around. The column in Boston would be present-day obviously, but if I were to blog I imagine I would intertwine the philosophical nature of what you guys have already established with a sort of New Journalism style. Journalism of Big Ideas, I guess.

Will:

I love it!

Nick:

Awesome—I'm going to reread some of the blogs today and see if I can't get something going!

The Saline Avenger (Part 3 of 3)

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 20 September 2015.

Arthur and Mordred by William Hatherell

I'm knocked out by all the brilliant stuff!

I've also been prepping for the Kairos retreat I'm directing starting tomorrow. Please forgive my gap in communication!

So, if the vengeful angel is Will's son, we end up with Will as a dark distortion of King Arthur and his bastard son, Mordred?

If we run with a character as disturbing as you've described, I think we would need a figure of a God 's love in the story who reflects the grace of God more strongly than the vengeful angel reflects Puritanical justice.

That character should probably be Arthur, which I think is a tough move for you, given your relationship with the character. I think I've written all of the miraculous stuff into his character, and you've written all of his foibles! In so many ways, you are nicer to Farthington than you are to Arthur, which I get from playing Will. I can put my shortcomings into Will, but I still don't feel like he's that much like me. I'm not entrepreneurial, brash, or patriotic. You may have a little Puritan modesty going on, which might really be self-deprecation, since anything that makes Arthur an impressive figure might be read as a reflection of you.

Old Habits Die Hard

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 7 September 2015.

Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, 10 May 1813

Here are the words to "Old Habits."

As always, feel free to change them. The only thing essential to the song is the idea that the song is cyclical--it needs to end where it begins. I can't remember if I told you, but it seems especially fitting now--the lyrics are based on a chain email that went around a lot during the Bush years. I'm not sure why it's less popular under Obama, but I'm sure it's his fault. Thanks, Obama.

Anyway, it's based on a cool theory that has been misattributed since the days of print. I've attached a Snopes article on it; they seem to have cut their research into the history of the piece's publication beyond the last few decades. It seems fitting in the context of the album and the project that the song features the wisdom of a made-up person that has been passed down for at least two hundred years without ever properly citing any sources. Ostensibly, it gets passed down because people remember that one newspaper article they read, which turns into that one radio story they heard, which becomes that one magazine article they can't find, etc. Maybe Slender Man wrote it originally.

Here's another exposé with more of the older history.

Old Habits Die Hard

Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray
Found the strength
To break free
Forged a path
Of liberty
Grew our home
Our way of life
Forgot the days
Of pain and strife
When others fell
We let them be
They didn’t work
As hard as we

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

And then the bills
Kept rolling in
We’d lost our sense
Of discipline
We looked for help
At any price
Easily
Absorbed advice

Old habits die hard
Old habits die hard

For anything
We’d get for free
Relinquished our
Autonomy
Slaves to desire
We lost our way
Til we found faith
Began to pray

Old habits die hard. x 4

We Go Medieval on the Seventies

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to the group on 4 September 2015.

Detail of The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch

Okay, I think what you've clarified is the intuitive leap we made a while ago between the cults of the seventies and the digital age.

Both speak to the spiritual needs of a culture that has lost God. Farthington is more of a song-and-dance man, an Oz who points people to something larger than himself that isn't really God. He's also a Vernean scientist, though, leading people on wild rides toward proof of something greater than man.

Steffi Humboldt (I just mistyped it Hymboldt!) is basically the digital age. She not only "gets in front of" where Farthington chases (although he chases to get in front of great catastrophes, mainly to be the authority on them), but in our vision of the feminist totalitarian warlord she becomes one with the satellite and absorbs all data into herself, which perhaps makes her the whore of Babylon.

We also have the Benefactor, who doesn't take vacation photos even though she oversees Detroit/America's rise and fall and who ultimately recognizes she must have a showdown with Steffi and lose, kind of like Beowulf vs. The Red Dragon except the dragon doesn't die...it absorbs Beowulf's power. Here we have McLuhan's idea that the global village recalls the patterns of paganism, which I think is the lens through which he read Nietzsche. I remember some outburst of his in which it dawned on him that Nietzsche's "God is dead" refers to the Newtonian god of "everything in its proper place."

Speaking of proper place, McLuhan would agree with Baudrillard that we retreat to the comfort of bonanzaland rather than live in our own age, but I don't think that's what we're up to. The only part of our project that sentimentalizes the seventies is the music, and I am not using sentimentalizes pejoratively here. I love seventies music unabashedly and you know how much sheer joy I get out of trying to play the difference between a 1974 song and a 1975 song...I'm like a kid in a candy store.

But outside of that very necessary indulgence, we are upending everything else that is warm and fuzzy about the past. In our own way, we've gone medieval on the seventies, like a Bosch painting! Our seventies slouches toward Bethlehem and eviscerates American history and the digital age through the tale of the lodestone. The only comfy place we're offering in our upcoming efforts is the album, and it's hard to call an album of prophecies calming. In fact, the prospect of a Trump presidency is making "Hey Rome" feel especially prescient, like we are this close to the lodestone revealing America for what we are. I'm tempted to vote for him, except that I'd feel like Judas, who may have betrayed Christ to see Him manifest his power.

At any rate, I also remember McLuhan saying he has no point of view because electronic culture made being grounded impossible, which is why our project examines from all viewpoints and resists just being a book or a musical or a series or even just being written. It's why it can be an 18th-century autopsy of 20th- and 21st-century culture, and my favorite, a 14th-century morality play with a postmodern take on memento mori.

The Doo Doo Chasers

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 13 August 2015.

Bootsy Collins

I've been watching a documentary on P-Funk, and there's a big section on the influence of the group on other groups that makes me think of their influence on us in this project.

I think P-Funk, Frank Zappa, and Devo were the first major bands in my life that made me love high-concept in music. I've seen P-Funk and its different permutations more than any other group in my life. The best show I ever saw was Bootsy's New Rubber Band at Industry in Pontiac. I was in the front row, and Bootsy saw I was so into it, he came down off of the stage mid-song and hugged me, then hopped back on stage. I was baptized in Bootsy sweat. At one point, he told us all he was going to run around the room and and hug everybody. He said his security guards said you can't do that--you need protection. He said this is Detroit. These are my people. They're all the protection I need. At the end of the show, they shut off all the instruments and led us in a chant of "Keep the funk alive." All the members of the band came off the stage and gave the women in the audience roses. They left in darkness. There was no encore--we wanted one, but we also knew there was no way to add to what they already put on stage.

I think that story plays into our desire in the project to bring everybody into it...to turn people into characters in the drama. So much of the framework of P-Funk is rooted in this idea that artists must draw people into a total environment (visual art, music, ritual, writing, etc.) that incessantly shines a flashlight on the falsity of the world we live in and guides people toward the transcendent. Allegory, myth-making, and ritual draw people into the mothership that guides people toward the transcendent...they meet people in both places that we all live and make us look at both...the earthly and the heavenly. I think my desire to take on a character is rooted to some extent in Starchild and Sir Nose. Will is largely a Sir Nose character, and Will and Arthur's story is sort of an inversion of the story of Sir Nose and Starchild...through much of the story, instead of Starchild curing Sir Nose by hitting him with the Bop Gun, our Sir Nose zaps our Starchild with electroconvulsive therapy after years of trying to keep him from swimming. But the two stories will end up the same...our Sir Nose is eventually horrified by his actions and repents and tries to follow the lead of the mangled Starchild.

I was listening to "The Doo Doo Chasers" this morning, and it is interesting to me how in Funkadelian terms, our project is a bit constipated. Free your mind and your ass will follow, but in our case, it seems like we let our minds wander really, really free, and as I've mentioned before, they too frequently detach from our asses. There's something in George Clinton's model where he just constantly was in motion, writing music, recording performing...and then within all of that action, the ideas came together and grew around the action. Our action tends to follow the thought, but our thought to action ratio is very high to very low--or the thought is the action, in the case of the blog. I'm really excited for the album. I really liked the last show, too--it had that atmosphere of total involvement, or close to total involvement for the people who didn't leave after Iceland! Even that is a type of involvement, though...the first show didn't have that as much, and the open mic was kind of a spectacle--sit back and watch the weirdos until the next acoustic guitar act comes up (which was also super fun--don't get me wrong!). I think that idea of Arthur White vacation tours makes a ton of sense. I also wonder about how most of our medium is the Internet and small stage rather than the radio, record player, and concert hall.

I should get to work. There's more to think about, though.

All Things New

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Also, I was trying to figure out in the last show why Arthur still cares about Carlton Farthington or Iceland.  I was content with the idea that we don't really know the nature of Arthur's mission right now, that it is inscrutable and that hearing the beauty of his music and seeing him come back into his powers would make more sense than some logical explanation for his behavior.

But in light of "Behold, I make all things new," maybe the idea is that Arthur is part of God's plan in transforming everything Farthington set in motion, everything the lodestone set in motion. In this regard, this intuition I've had that Arthur becomes the new lodestone makes sense. It also fits the Arthurian notion, that Arthur isn't so much a heroic protagonist as the figure around whom things happen. Maybe recreating the Iceland concert heralds "all things new" when the original concert heralded "turbulent reversals."

As far as the morality play goes, here is the closest thing I see to an allegorical structure.  Of course, we don't have simple allegory and shouldn't, but whatever...I'll just say what's on my mind.

• Arthur:  the herald of "all things new"
• Stan, Will:  the rise and fall of the American Dream
• Farthington:  science, psychology, and media ecology as false religions
• Steffi:  digital existence and postmodern nihilism
• The Benefactor/Victoria Woolf/Leif Erikson's sister/the lodestone: the hold and resurgence of myth and paganism

Back to Arthur--some priest friends of mine have explored the idea privately (they are worried this might not be theologically accurate, but it seems pretty valid) that Christ seems to say over and over again that he prefers repentant sinners to people who have never fallen in the face of sin. It would probably make sense that if Arthur is the herald of All Things New, that he himself must walk a path of being made new, that his youth should be full of promise and blessing, and that all that promise and blessing must be smashed through his own failures and the sins of his people and culture. Then he should be brought to glory through Christ, not through some modern notion of "getting back on track" or "being his best self."

A transformation in Arthur, then, would not so much be about getting his act together, but in getting a glimpse behind the curtain that God has ordained his life to be a witness. In this regard, we end up with the existentialist issue with the absurd, which is why we must engage the French (and Kierkegaard and the Russians and Nietzsche of course).  We also engage Chesterton's Man Who Was Thursday and Greene's The Power and the Glory: the notion that evil is so evil that good seems to be a lie, and good is so good that evil seems to be a mistake, and the notion that even a dark, fizzling out world can be the shadow of a glorious divine plan beyond our comprehension.

This is a completely messed up thought, but we might be on the verge of making the What's Going On of our age!  How crazy that this is the path that may lead us there.  It absolutely fits.

Laughing Song

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 10 August 2015.

Laughing Song by William Blake

Thanks for the clarification. I envy how well-read you are! My dream this summer has been to lie on the beach with a stack of books for a few days on end. Hasn't happened yet! I think I'm relying to frequently on biases I formed a decade or two ago...when I got what I perceived as the big picture, I stopped looking at the details, to my discredit.

I really like the shift you made in "Hey Rome" toward the idea that Rome goes from the seat of the oppressors of Christ to the seat of his Church on earth, that Christ can use all of human absurdity and turn it into divine justice, mercy, and love, all of which appear absurd from the context of our own absurd perversions of these things.

Your discussion actually verges on two things I was hoping for a long time ago in the story: some sort of truth that Arthur White the character can deliver to mankind both in the story and through the project, and some sort of homage to medieval morality plays.

At this point, I don't think Arthur has to have some profound wisdom, but as an enigmatic and seeming focal point in the story, there should be something in him that consistently points toward God's grace. If there is a phrase for it, it's my favorite line from Revelations: Behold, I make all things new. Rome is one of the great emblems we have of Christ's words. In that regard, this album should point upwards and carry this message of the man-made collapsing and being transformed through Christ.

I see a few things happening here.

One is that Will, through decades of suffering, is in the process of reconsidering most of his assumptions and has the humility to encourage his brother to make the album completely on Arthur's terms to the point of bowing out of it if that's what Arthur wants. And then, to steal from The Wife of Bath's Tale, Arthur invites him in, so that Will plays a supporting role instead of a controlling one. I think "Centerstage" makes sense on this album within the theme of "Behold, I make all things new." My songs tend to rip on America, but they don't hit the personal enough. "One and Only" might also work.  By the way, "One and Only" is very Songs of Innocence to me: "In my dreams I heard the sweet song of a bird, and it left me reeling with a happy feeling."

LAUGHING SONG

When the green woods laugh with the voice of joy,
And the dimpling stream runs laughing by;
When the air does laugh with our merry wit,
And the green hill laughs with the noise of it;
When the meadows laugh with lively green,
And the grasshopper laughs in the merry scene;
When Mary and Susan and Emily
With their sweet round mouths sing ‘Ha ha he!’
When the painted birds laugh in the shade,
Where our table with cherries and nuts is spread:
Come live, and be merry, and join with me,
To sing the sweet chorus of ‘Ha ha he!’

Buddy Holly

The following is an excerpt of an email sent from Will to Art on 6 August 2015.



Speaking of commercials, have you seen the Honda commercial in which the family in the minivan has a singalong to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer?

It encapsulates more than anything I've ever seen, I think, what I hate about being a white person. I've been thinking about race in our story a lot, and it has an undead nature to it, as well. Is it possible that the most effective way for our story to confront problems of white privilege and racism is to keep the discussion muted and in the fringes of the story? I think that's the way whiteness tends to operate, and it seems to be the story of suburban Detroit and Henry Ford's urban planning.

I think white people tend to win a false victory over their feelings of racism by carefully controlling their exposure to non-white people and culture. That way, the white person gets to have all sorts of feelings of love and admiration for people and cultural artifacts that aren't white while never having to engage, at least for very long, in any personally challenging interpersonal or social experience.

I can listen to NWA and side with Ice Cube without having to deal with 90's Compton, for instance. I think of how metro-Detroit hipsterism works. If you are from Birmingham, you become cooler by moving to Royal Oak, but Ferndale trumps Royal Oak, Hamtramck trumps Ferndale, Corktown trumps Hamtramck, and the Cass Corridor trumps Corktown.

But at some point, you're less of a poseur if you are just an ignorant yokel from Wyandotte who just stays in Wyandotte.