Vertebrae - Christine Fellows

Once again, a song will not leave my mind alone so I want to write about it. I usually have other plans and intents. I hope to get around to them as I actually have an idea as to something I want to do on this web log.

But first, this song. I found it, as I do most things lately, on a podcast. An episode of the Spotify podcast Duet, with guest hosts Jack Antonoff of Bleachers and John Darnielle of the Mountain goats ("tMg") They were choosing songs that affected them, and one that John chose was this track. 

I have become increasingly fond of John Darnielle. First mention was on a vlogbrothers video when John (Green) was nerding out about sharing an event with John (Darnielle). It didn't stick for me. One of my other friends got into some of tMg music along with They Might Be Giants ("TMBG") music, both hardworking indie darling artists who had strong DIY energy. I listened a bit more as this friend had more of a direct connection than a parasocial recommendation. But it took Joseph Fink, co-writer of the narrative podcast "Welcome to Night Vale", hosting a podcast with John Darnielle called "I Only Listen to the Mountain goats" to really seal it for me. John was a very aware host and was honest about the odd position of co-hosting a show all about his own band's greatness and impact. He was gracious, kind, and honest - he feels more of a fan of other artists than viewing himself that way.

I am giving you context for my experience, because it frames things. Rarely is something only itself, but everything that thing touches and the angle by which I arrive. Yours will be different with your assumptions and experiences.

But the song. It was recorded at her home studio. And it is a song about the process of sustained mourning, before the greater drop of grief. The experience of knowing a loved one is dying slowly in a hospital. Knowing the loss is not yet. But is coming. It is the downbeat of a fragile wing trying to keep the narrator aloft to witness the winds of death coming. The song is not about the person dying really, but the stress and experience of small things the narrator is doing and not doing to cope with this great helplessness. Small details like not knowing how they got to the room with flowers, going out to make coffee no one will drink, gestures that try to do something supportive and helpful because you can't do a thing about the bigger issue.

The details in the song frame the shape of something through the edges where the narrator is avoiding talking about the elephant in the room. The distress and discomfort of maneuvering around it. You see the weight through the gravity of the narrator's pull towards the upcoming experience of death and their struggles against it.

This is not an experience I have had much personal experience with living through, but Fellows communicates a vivid message through the snapshots of moments of lucidity in the midst of dazed autopilot.

It is a song that makes me care through empathy and try to mentally comprehend an incomprehensible part of life in that it will someday end. Not only for me, but for those I love. It is emotional practice and exposure so that I might remember it for later, knowing that I am not alone in going through it when it inevitably happens. Not now, hopefully no time soon, but in the case it does, that I have some context. Sometimes I like just viewing things through another's eyes and wondering how I would handle the situation if presented to me. Books are helpful for this experience and exposure. Not that I long for those events to happen in reality, but that I try to understand that there are people who are going through such things and have empathy for them rather than ignorance.

Habits die hard deaths

I decided to haiku

Weird streak to keep up.

Jesus Was A Cross Maker - Judee Sill

 A whole post about one song. Because it won't leave me alone. But first a story. I first heard this song on a Kieron Gillen spotify playlist curated for his comic series "Wicked + The Divine." A series which is fascinating on its own and had thoughts to say about Divinity, Mythology, and Popular Music. Gillen is a creator who is very taken by music and inspired by it, and I like him and am truly grateful for his varied tastes of influences which I might never have encountered before.

But I was doing a foolish thing of running laps for an extended period and this particular playlist is very long, as Gillen had kept adding to it while writing the series. It is a real grab bag of elements: Punk, Bowie, British indie, electro pop, the Mountain goats, funk. But I come across this song, "Jesus Was A Cross Maker." Coming from a religious background, I am sensitive and analytical whenever Jesus is brought up in a song. Is it to praise or mock religion, is it in the wheelhouse of music for the saints preaching to the choir, or of the chorus of sinners on the outside looking in on quaintness?

But as I listened to it, "Jesus Was A Cross Maker" takes neither easy path of categorization. I can't draw a bead on what it is. It starts with a piano and Sill's vocals on almost a hymn start, with the vocals occasionally being doubled for harmony. It describes a rogue who is troubling the singer of the song and comes to the hook, "He's a bandit and a heartbreaker, but Jesus was a Cross Maker"

I am running with headphones. I have never encountered this song, let alone this artist before. I am busy and did not know that this song would mention Christ. As mentioned above, I am intrigued and paying attention now to see if I can guess where this is going. And I keep being surprised by the song. A drum gets added, and the piano gets saucy with itself, adding notes around the chorus, Sill's harmonies soar and dip, then start at a base again for the next verse. I now have learned that the song can pick up and play with me a little, not just be a ballad or hymn. The second verse further describes the rogue troubling the narrator, waging war with the devil, with further religious imagery. But it continues to not be directly about Christ. He is there in the song, but is not the direct issue at hand. Christ may be a source of salvation and hope for the narrator in this song, including for the rogue being sung about.

But the song just doesn't fit in an easy box for me to dismiss. It is from a different era by its recording quality and ticks, but its arrangement is inventive with sparseness, and eventually adds strings, which I was not expecting, but fit so well. This is a song that fits an era, but also is so deliberately arranged that it has a personal touch to why and how it was crafted. It fits the artist and would force an imitator to pay attention to its construction in order to cover it properly. And the lyrics about a troubled relationship are poetic and specifically delivered. There is an element of regret and recognition in the tone, but delivered with honesty and beauty. And I mentally file the track away to search for later for further study. I am running and am too busy to stop and learn more about it in the moment.

But I come back to it later and still don't understand it when giving it my full attention. How does it fit together the way it does? What is it trying to communicate? Why did someone create this song specifically and why does it appeal to my curiosity?

I listen to it more and really grow to admire and appreciate it for the reasons above. But I have never heard of this artist. Who is Judee Sill and why am I just learning about her now? I look into her life and that helps frame how her life experiences could inspire and create the specificity of the song's lyrics and performance. I look through Spotify for more covers of the song to see if other artists were interested in the song and saw fit to cover it. I listen to their covers and each does not appeal as much for different reasons.

Mama Cass Elliot of the Mamas & the Papas fame was also featured on Gillen's playlist for the track "Make Your Own Kind of Music", which I enjoyed. But Elliot did a cover of Sill's "Cross Maker" and the recording just felt off to me - it was as if the accompanying band and Elliot were on different pages. Sill's version has odd timing choices, and yet the instruments moved with Sill. In Elliot's cover, she will hold a note for emphasis, then seem to have to rush to catch up with the band who didn't account for that diversion in the schedule.

The Hollies do a cover of the song. I like this band for "Long Cool Woman (In a Black Dress)", which I heard first in Remember The Titans for its perfect use in a montage in the film. Their cover of "Cross Maker" understands that harmony is an important part of the song, but it is Beach Boys or Weezer sounding, without the pathos of the original. It is like a nice garment on a mannikin, in that you can see the design and see the skill in execution, but the expression on the face can only be made to look so sad without the lived experience communicated through the human element of the song.

A third cover is by Warren Zevon. I think he gets the closest to the spirit of the original. He takes his time over the lines of the song, considering what is being sung about, he has a gentleness and patience in the care he uses, with some sympathy for the rogue in the song. There has to be rueful love for the subject of the song. I think this is a good cover of the song, in that it understands the material and how an artist can take it and make it fit what they can do best to honor it in their own voice.

There is a recent 2020 cover by Chessa Rich, who was unfamiliar to me as an artist. I think this is a good cover too, but it shifts some lyrics to be about trees and has soft holiday elements as it is on a winter mixtape album. My mother likes this version. Rich thinks about the words as she sings them and yet I don't believe she knows them the way that Sill and Zevon give the narrator's verisimilitude of having lived and survived a rough situation needing that longing for salvation. That the rogue was not good for them, they can't save the relationship, they can't save the person, but they love them and hope someone can give both parties the salvation they cannot offer each other. You can't give what you don't have, in relationships, and in performances. You can go through the motions, but the true salvation is known through nails and scars that leave marks. 

 I don't know music

Understanding through mere effect

So I just reflect.

Foundation's Edge (Book 4) - Isaac Asimov

 I hadn't consciously read an Asimov story. Which seems difficult, given that he has been credited with 470 of them in his life. But I had somehow managed to not do so.

I was walking with a friend last year, and he had read them. I like hearing what people read, and he tried to describe it to me. "Some statistician determines that a space empire will collapse and crafts a plan to make that dark age as short as possible - if a group of people follow a series of videos he recorded before dying. Every so often, he releases a video in a vault or cave when he determines it is likely that something will need to be done to keep on track with his vision." I replied this sounds completely arrogant and paternalistic to attempt. What kind of man would have the gall to dictate to people how to live from beyond the grave? I was told that the execution was a benevolent vibe rather than an arrogant one. I was amenable enough to try to see it through myself.

The first book was published in the 50s, and a glorious hardcover with scattered illustrations was a good first impression of the series. Which I heard described as a trilogy. (Reading the title of the post? Book 4?! We'll get to that.). First book goes as advertised. I kinda find myself liking the pronosticator, he seems a well meaning and thoughtful figure. A society of scientists are stationed at one edge of the galactic empire with the mission to create a Noah's Ark encyclopedia of all useful knowledge for the coming storm. Strong leaders and figures come across crises as expected and the video direction hints at what to do. The society survives, and the leaders who piloted the society through the crises become legendary figures themselves. I get through 80% of the book and realize that I haven't seen a woman described, even though the book covers a good stretch of time as the society establishes itself. Because I am looking, I finally see a lady, but she is a silly petty wife of a ruler on a neighboring planet. I observe the sidestep, but the book is mainly strong and interesting, so Asimov played to his strengths.

Second book is split into different periods. The society of scientists, the Foundation, have established a basis of survival by technological advances and trade empire with neighboring planets, creating a dependence on the Foundation to maintain a standard of life as the Empire's influence drowns in bureaucracy and administration. The Foundation leaders grow a little shifty in figuring out how to adapt to crises, as they have to evolve or die and strategies of previous generations have to be reconfigured rather than be autopilot course forward. In the second half of the book, something EXTREMELY weird happens - a mysterious conqueror named the Mule is able to take over most of the galaxy, including the Foundation's home planet. How can this be? There was a Plan, what does this mean for the dark age? Turns out that the Mule has the ability to influence the emotional state of others with their mind, they are a mutant psychic. It is noticed that of all the scientists sent to establish the Foundation, there are no disciplines of sociology and psychiatric ability represented. So there becomes a question as to whether the prognosticator did this on purpose to be sure that no one overruled his Plan by guessing or theorizing different paths before they came up as crises. But it is now a problem, because this hostile takeover by the Mule is shaking faith in the Plan coming to pass. Female characters are represented in this book, but they mostly have the feel of neutral male voice, the feminine quality does not have a strong showing. This is possibly bias on my part, but there is more of an effort by Asimov than the first book.

The third book, Second Foundation, deals with the question of whether the Planmaker has established a secret second society of mental scientists to keep his plan on track. This freaks out the current Foundation, and occupies the Mule, who is passively ruling the Foundation. If there is such a secret, it might oppose the reign of the Mule, because there can be wheels within wheels to sabotage efforts of a new Empire under the Mule. Efforts are made, hints are raised, the Mule sends out controlled scouts to sniff out this threat. Ultimately, the Second Foundation agents are uncovered and are able to defeat the Mule. While he is a natural mutant, they trained in mental discipline to be able to manipulate others' minds too.

At this point, I was really confused. This is a far leap from what I was promised in the first book. Yes, I can accept statistical modelling of a future called Psychohistory. That sounds like a premise. I was not expecting to be derailed from the Plan by a Mutant Mind Controller in the second book, but he is a fluke adding tension and drama. Now you get to a third book where through sweat equity, a secret society charged with keeping the Plan maintained on course are ALSO psychic manipulators? What a twist! And this Second Foundation like a cat out of a bag, tries to duck back into the bag to observe and not be detected. But the First Foundation is now paranoid and skittish - what if they are not the chosen ones and are not being manipulated by the devil they know through video, but also by that devil's REAL chosen disciples who might shape events to overrule the governance and autonomy of the first group. A conclusion is reached, where the First Foundation believes they have engineered a technological innovation to protect their minds and root out these Second Foundation psychic freaks.

We now get to the Fourth book, the subject here. The publishers and readers note that the 1,000 year period of the Foundation Plan timeline was not halfway described yet. What were you thinking, Asimov? It may be a trilogy in number and feel traditionally complete for a story arc, but the contents did not cover all that ground you promised. What happens? So Asimov resumes publishing the next book in 1982. He has had years to hone what to do. And he puts a woman as a political leader of the Foundation as mayor. She is his strongest female representation so far, though a bit of an Iron Lady, firm and experienced in how to achieve her desired results through subtle maneuvering in conversational power dynamics. A young upstart is convinced that the video update is too perfect, the Plan is suspiciously back on track. The Second Foundation must still exist and should be found - the First Foundation should not have to wonder if their actions are being manipulated by a shadowy group. So the Mayor sends him on a quest with an old scholar with the intent of drawing out Second Foundation interest. The old scholar is obsessed with finding Earth - the planet of origin of all humanity. Meanwhile, the Second Foundation also has an ambitious upstart in its ranks, who noticed that the group is indeed being too good at getting back on track and raising the First Foundation's suspicions. So he is sent out to try to figure out how to quell this mess a second time by convincing the First Foundation to believe the threat gone again. The book's plot comes to a climax on an uncharted planet, Gaia, that used to be ruled by robots, an institution of automation that no outside world knows about. And this Gaia planet that the Mule escaped from to wreck conquering havoc on the galaxy generations back. And the world has the feature of a common telepathic group consciousness. And once again, I wonder how the series got to this weird place where science fiction has dipped deeper into fantasy evolution. And the politician upstart, who has been described as a flirt, is suspicious of the Gaia planet's first contact, a beautiful young woman, who the old scholar imprints upon with great interest. A decision is made about the future direction of the galaxy, because both Foundations are too powerful and would dominate the galaxy too early with military or psychological might to hold the galaxy in line. Then I get to a last chapter and something else is revealed that I did not expect. Asimov just continues to rip rugs out from under his reader. And I am baffled and fascinated. I like weird things happening. I like being in on the joke when a writer makes weird things happen. But this series doesn't indulge in humor except of a very wry kind. So I don't think Asimov is intending to be funny. I have one more book to go in the series and am REALLY curious how he plans to escalate this chaos into either further weirdness or into some sort of order.

I do not think joy

Motivates this sci fi boy

Galaxy as toy.

Mun Mun - Jesse Andrews

 When I started this blog, I was given the advice of not reviewing a book I disliked. It was in the spirit of not dunking on a book just to flex strength of clever barbs and digs.

So when I say I disliked this book and still intend on reviewing it, I am aware of the greater rule I am breaking here. But this book got an emotional response from me. It is effective satire of holding a funhouse mirror up to the world and asking it's audience if they like what they are seeing.

You know how there is the trope of one mirror making to look tall and the next making you look short. The world of Mun Mun makes this metaphor literally tied to a person's personal wealth. The richer the person, the physically bigger they are able to become.

There is a banking system to keep track of an individual's base wealth or "scale", determining the person's size. And a second account for cash flow purposes of maintaining that lifestyle.

The book follows a tenthscale teenager, about the size of a rat (animal sizes are not tied to wealth, which makes its own kind of sense). On the first page, he details the tragedy of losing his father to a larger scale person being bullied and pushed into crushing the tiny family's house and killing his dad. Then his mom was hustling to put bread on the table and a cat attacked her and messed up her spine. Life sucks when you live in fear all the time, and the larger people don't want to suffer the consequences, morally or financially for the misfortune and fallout of the poor and their small lives.

So the main character, Warner, has a mission of getting rich and growing bigger to escape that miserable existence. Also, in this world, there is a shared dreamspace, and Warner is skilled at shaping environments to his creative will. It is a great equalizer to be able to dream big and turn the tables on your tormentors in their sleep by invading their dreams and giving them nightmare landscapes. But, alas, he always has to wake up and accept that this power does not carry over to monetization in the real world where it is life or death.

Mostly, this book shines a light on how those with money can shape the world to their desires, live larger than life, trample the less fortunate and unprotected under their feet, and don't want to be bothered. If they are held accountable for making the world a better place, why should THEY be the ones to suffer? They might have to downsize and live a smaller life, be inconvenienced, be exposed to more risk. No, it is better to try to keep their heads up and try to conserve their wealth to try to grow even bigger and reduce their exposure. And so the cycle continues.

And when the bigs do think of the littles, it is irritation at giving them a handout. If they are little, they probably deserve to be little. Because you have to work hard, be a productive member of society, and earn money to get ahead. Those who succeed get big.

However, Warner and his family are tiny. Navigating the world takes longer, having to avoid hazards that the big people can sidestep or subdue. Also, Warner is illiterate, as books are not made in his scale, let alone schools. Why waste resources on tiny people? They are an afterthought, if they must be thought about at all.

This book details how difficult life is when you are born in a cycle of poverty. A recent tweet I saw was, "You did not make good choices, you HAD good choices." And Warner does not have access to good choices for the majority of the book. His attempts to better himself and gain a foothold on becoming a productive member of society are hampered by the reality that this world is not configured in a way that gives him a chance to succeed. The paths are paved for people that society has deemed are eligible for a chance of potential for growth, and resources go to supporting that system continuing.

Overall, I did not enjoy reading this book, but do recommend reading it for its critiques of the pitfalls of social and economic systems. I don't want the world to be as bleak and dismal as depicted here, but know that this discomfort is not from its foreignness, but how familiar  and logical it feels. It is a cold system and I want to be a warmer person, but this book is a chill wind that causes me to shiver and I hope summer will come soon on humanity and its consciences.

These were not very fun

Economic metaphors

Get Rich or be squashed.