Conan the Barbarian Priest Poet

by DAMIAN WEBER

There is a hole in the earth shaped like a sword where a fire is eternal. In it there is a liquid that burns. Smoke pours out. The low god Crum creates the weapon. The sword solidifies in the molten lava volcano forge crack in the earth. Dark spots in the sword where the metal takes shape look like sun spots. The sword is six feet long (as tall as a Kentuckian — the term Melville used for the length of Moby Dick's penis). The sand is a Mars golden red color. We have entered not only another time but a different world on this earth. It has taken this low god years to forge the weapon talisman standard flag cross. Crum was surely a god to these men because he made metal burn. To spend my days as god over these children Crum growls is there not a man! Crum the low god has a big hippie beard and large feathered hair. His brow is furrowed from years of worry. No one believed he was a god — now this last desperate act to convince the world. The sword is pulled from the fire. A molten mess. A hideous awful blunt instrument for bludgeoning. The lady with the man's face approves. She has jowls like the Rancor Monster and cheeks above her eyes. She has the face of a Nordic queen. She stares into the fire and thinks I am going to kill you. The fire obscures her face as her thoughts become deadly. She disappears into the darkness. Her features become fainter almost fuckable. When I get my hands on that sword she scowls I'm going to cut myself to pieces. Everyone looks on. They are waiting. Each of them wants the sword. The boy thinks of animals he will kill. He could cut a horse in half. He could finally get a hold of the birds in the sky. But mostly he would like to kill the old man—prove he is not a god.

The old man knows they want to kill him. He moves slowly so they think he is feeble. He can't die. They can cut him how they like. He has been cut before — he cut them back. Into pieces. And ate them. And waved them out his ass. The sword is raised in the air. Crum knows this is the moment. They will attack. He looks weak. He lowers the blade and tempers it in the snow. The phallic symbolism is not to be missed. It is used again — to wipe the blade. He knows they will be on him. Let them rush. He lets them cut. It feels good. No it feels bad. But he enjoys it. Like dying in a dream — it's no matter. Let the cat scratch up your arm — only stings. Satisfaction. They see he cannot die. He is a god. Crum. Their god. Now they will learn. He cuts the boy first. I hate kids he thinks. Next the Norse Queen. He sticks the sword in her leg. She is pinned to the ground. He explains to her that she must die then kills her.

Crum gives a speech. It is droll. Fire and wind come from the sky. From the gods of the sky. But Crum is your god.

The boy is back. He has been reconstituted — like meat. He is now Crum's servant. He has wonderful eighties hair. The clouds move behind him. It is good to be alive again he thinks. Right as rain. Next time I kill this old man he’s done. His face is superimposed on the sublime. Best ever yearbook photo. He looks like a young Linda Hamilton. He too is a babe. Once giants lived in the Earth. In the darkness of chaos they fooled Crum and took from him the enigma of steel.

What is this old man talking about? Please stop spitting in my face when you talk. How come the boy asks it's called the enigma of steel when it's a sword? The dad scowls. Crum was angered and the Earth shook and fire and wind struck down these giants and they threw their bodies into the waters. But in their rage the gods forgot the secret of steel and left it on the battle field. We who found it are just men. Not gods. Not giants. Just men. The secret of steel has a mystery. You must learn its riddle boy. You must learn its discipline. For no one the old man got excited no one can you trust. Not men. Not women. Not beasts. This he says (eyeing the sword like a gun) this ... you can trust.

The old man then hands over the sword to the boy so he can feel its weight. The markings on it are clearly Celtic even though this is the time of giants. The boy can hardly lift the sword. But he’ll use it. Your verse is droll he says to his dad. Bad poetry. You say things as you think they should be. Your speech is like you think someone should give. I stand here superimposed in front of the sky on top a mountain. You rely too heavily on the real. I am wholly unreal. Sorry. The poet carves new words into the old man’s arms. Here is language. About to kill the old man he says You have failed the words. He kills him. I killed you dad.

Two riders approach over the snowy hill. Their horses are armored. They are Russian Viking Mongol Futurists. Their faces are painted white like evil teardrop clowns. Some have masks like Japanese samurai some wear fur caps like Genghis Khan and some Soviet fur hats. They are time travelling. And hungry. The staff they carry is a snake with two heads. It is the staff of men who have a second mouth for an asshole. They eat and shit words out the same mouth. They are unable to differentiate. Like most. Hanging off the staff is a scalped human head. It belonged to the last academic poet they encountered who failed to believe language can be made shitting out words.

The poet has killed a deer and brought it into camp. He prayed to Crum you made the animals without speech. They speak perfect words. They are the chapbook I work ceaselessly on. This deer is my first book of poems. I dedicate it to your death. The camp is excited about the kill and makes preparations. They are an advanced culture much like 1850s England with a mill stone to roll wheat. They wear the skins of animals they have killed. Their jewelry makes them a flamboyant clan.

The poet has put on his father's skin and enters the village. Finally he will fuck his mom. He goes to their tent. It is cozy. He goes straight to his tool bench though. He doesn't want to give in too soon. His mom never looked hotter. She's like a drugged Norse queen. Her lips are the poutiest. Her disheveled hair drives him wild — he knows she'll be a demon lay. She doesn't approach him and he thinks God I hate you. What's the point of being a sexy beast if you can't seduce me? He turns away in disgust and gives up. These girls are no help he says to himself as he walks out. He leaves his father’s skin on the ground for his mom to contemplate.

The clan of the two snakes is about to rampage the village. They gallop through the trees. The first sign of attack is a half man half penis animal who perches on a rock and sniffs the air like a dog. He knows they are close. Soon there will be meat in his mouth. Both kinds. He sees him but he isn't scared. He knows they won't kill him. Maybe kiss him a little. The clan heads into the village. Good. He hates them. He runs back to the hut and makes his best friend wear his dad's skin. There is a battle. They overact even in their deaths. It's their need to be dramatic that makes their deaths silly — their words the worst. You do me a favor he yells to no one. The one beautiful word he hears is from a dying man. 18 letters all vowels. It is original — the only believable sentence from this hack town.

In the chaos his mom runs for him. She's so needy he says to himself. But shocked he likes it. It's nice to have a girl need you. He thinks to himself maybe I could love a girl. He now understands what keeps men interested. Of course she had to wait until the village was destroyed. That's so annoying. Waiting until the last minute of your life to finally act. No he was premature in thinking he could love a woman. They are no help.

His best friend fights well in his dad's skin. He has the sword / secret / enigma. He ducks a swing. He cuts a man. Kill that one the leader says. The whole clan surrounds the dad skin — kills him. The poet and his mom look on. The dadskin is eaten by dogs.

The time travelling band of Russian Chinese Japanese Vikings now settle on the mother. She is holding him as they approach. He wants to yell out I have renounced her but doesn't. She is wearing fury boots like were stylish back then and now. She looks like Han Solo. The sword is covered in blood. The poet is excited. He can't wait to see what happens. Is this real life? he asks himself. For once something! Life before was slow motion. Like it was happening to someone else. He decides that from now on he will be alive.

James Earl Jones gets off his horse. He is a beautiful black woman. He has long black hair. He's trying to act. He walks up to her and calms her with his eyes. They are blue which disgusts everyone. She can't believe how weird it looks. She puts up a valiant fight standing doing nothing but James Earl Jones tilts his head slightly with an empathetic bent. He understands! She lowers her sword. She loves him. He looks at her like a creep then turns away. Where are you going? she thinks. He turns around and chops off her head. Like a jerk he must own her before he kills her. Her head falls on the ground — her body stays upright. Then she falls. In slow motion. The poet says to himself Ugly black woman for a lack of anything better to do I am going to spend my life in pursuit of you. I'll give you a head start.

The beautiful black woman moves her hand indicating she would like her helmet. When she puts it on she becomesJames Earl Jones again. Seriously wicked.

The whole encounter was wordless.

The clan leaves the town slowly. The huts are on fire. Heads on spikes. One sexy baby is placed upright and hernstraw hair makes her look like a scarecrow. The clan doesn’t take anything. They take hearts. Girlhearts.

Time is passing. It is now the future. He has a chain around his neck — a slave. A line of slaves. They look like Ewoks dressed in animal skins. In Ewok skins. They walk past a pagan statue much like a penis with a dead body at its base. It has no meaning. Senseless.

The slaves have travelled a great distance. The one that looks like the Artful Dodger has excellent eighties rock hair. He is clearly the hottest. Part little boy part little girl. They are out of the snow and in the desert. One of the boys falls. He is killed. A large javelin — wait a spear. They travel into spring. They are in Monument Valley. The snow capped mountains in the background are superimposed. He is travelling toward the digital west. But they have reached their destination. A carousel turned by boys. It is a millstone for rolling wheat and making fluffy breads. The Wheel of Pain. This is an important outpost. There is a death man on lookout. He is a blackbird. He caws at the newcomers. He has red hair and looks like Ronald the bear Weasley. No like the bully from A Christmas Story. He has Farrah Fawcett hair with swooshy flair. The poet is clamped to the wheel — loves his new activity. He has no other desires. This is a new life. He can't believe it. All I have to do he thinks is do this forever. Never to think again. To kill the poet’s head is a great favor — a poet’s superpower. He kicks a rock as he works. I'll see you on the other side rock. He turns to the boy next to him. I'll kill him first he thinks. Hey you. What's your name? The boy from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory turns to him and says Chuck. He looks at him. He can't believe it. That's cute he says I think I'll call you Andy. Do you know how to fade out Andy? Become nothing? To be strong? I'll show you. I won't say anything for the next 15 years and when I come back l will be my pure being. You should try it. See you on the other side Andy. The poet kills his head and becomes.

Fifteen years later he’s back. Turns on his head. He's now Arnold Schwarzenegger. Neat he thinks. His hair is long and he lost his shirt. When he wakes he looks like a man possessed. The world is new to him again. Another superpower of the poet is to have the world afresh. See he thinks the world is mine. Why would anyone not want to own this world when it is so mine? Hey Andy he says do you see that distance in the distance? It's mine. Oh hey rock good to see you again. Would you like to be owned by me? Too bad rock. I gotta break.

He is huge and has tits on his back. He is clean shaven and thinks what did these fucknuts do to me while I was out? Proving that the external world comes to you when you are ready the poet is freed from the wheel. Another superpower of the poet is that the external world is shaped in the mind. It's like telekinesis except it’s more like active appreciation. You are only as free as you think you are he says to his captors. The red headed blackbird unclamps him from the wheel and drags him up a mountain. Anything’s better than crawling he thinks. As the skin is torn from his back he wonders how humans can survive. It is a marvel he thinks my skin didn't shed. He doesn't howl in pain. He takes a new form. The world swirls purple like an absinthe drunk. No it’s back right again. This world is too easy he thinks.

Sit here! his captor tells him. He barks the order like talking to a child. You use language against itself the poet tells him and yourself. There is no place to sit. All I see is Earth and I don't sit on the Earth. It becomes me.

Sit here!

Should I sit on that mountain behind me? Should I sit on the dinosaurs? I'm playing — I'll sit.

He sits across from the first truly religious dude he's ever met. The man sits on a ledge over a pit. The pit has torches surrounding it and small statues like squatty gods. Together with the believer on one side and the poet on the other this is the new religion. But the poet notices the man is chained and has a hammer for a hand. The new religion is combat. Am I to kill this man to initiate the new world? The man doesn't move — he looks at the poet with complete disassociation. The poet is unfazed too. His is a peaceful dead face. They sit for hours probing each other’s minds asking questions through the air. Did you know your folks? How free is free? You ever been with a woman?

Night falls. The village has gathered. The men wear wigs under black bandanas. The women look like young boys with splotchy faces. Their skin is showing everywhere. They treat the poet like a dog — hand him scraps.

They unchain the hammer — he rises. There is murder in his eyes. He wants to become a priest. He wants it too much the poet thinks. There is a howl among the girls. Sexy. The poet is pushed into the pit. He backs away from the man but is kicked into the center. He wants to let the people think he doesn't have to kill this man. Your religion is for assholes! he yells. An iron fist hits him in the stomach. The man grabs the poet in a bear hug and tries to rip him in half. He bites off the poet's ear — he is awakened. Yes he doesn't need to kill but he wants to. He grabs the man’s arm behind his back in a chicken wing — breaks it cleanly. He rolls him over and breaks the other arm. The man doesn't quit. How ridiculous. The poet breaks his knees and still he thrashes wildly. Hold still the poet says soon you will reach the other side. You want to look like a fish? The poet puts him in a headlock and breaks his neck.

The crowd is stunned. You believe he says this is the new way. But there is no way. Only life. There are no answers. And no gods. Except me. And you. And love. And words. If I must kill this man then I must. If I must kill you ... then I must. But there is nothing I must do. I believe in nothing. In inaction. And the peace of self‐belief. I am not your new god. I am a priest. Learn the way.

The people jump into the pit and touch him like he is holy. He is handed a large wood standard that looks nothing like a Christian symbol (yes it does). They throw another faithful into the pit — the poet fights again. Yum.

The poet finds himself in china. He is locked outdoors in the sun. He is given texts to read as if he were learning for the first time. He didn’t tell them he was a University at Buffalo language poet who studied under greats like Robert Creeley Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe. He likes to read. Especially the post moderns and New York School. All halfbougie collegegrad bohotourists. But he really hates the beats. Too much religion. Not enough history. He likes poetry about poetry mostly. Writing about writers. Process poems. And nice things about the girl you like.

A slavegirl is brought into his cell. The door is locked. They watch. She is dressed in a robe but they take it from her showing her breasts. She does not attempt to cover herself. She stands naked except a brown diaper. She has long brown hair and wears an iron crown. They expect the barbarian to take her but he would rather write about how girls cause constant hurt feelings. Women are like mom. Family to be protected. Fear is on her face. He goes to her — covers her. She is relieved. Don't worry he says girls disgust me. Here eat my food. You'll be my pet. I'll call you RaceCar. I'll teach you the way.

The jailers look through the bars disgusted — hoping to see hot eighties tiger sex. He shoos them away. Away captors of our minds! They walk away in amazement. Certainly he is holy. Or half gay.

At night the China King has a dinner. Number One Kitchen. My biggest fear is my sons will never understand me he whines. What is best in life? he quizzes his sons.

The oldest son speaks first. The open steppe. A great horse. Falcons at your wrist and the wind in your hair. He answers proudly looking at the king. Say wrong to that dad!

Wrong! the king yells. The oldest son knew he was wrong. He likes to egg on his dad who's an old fool who he'll kill soon. The dad turns to the poet and asks him what is best in life. To crush your enemies. To see them driven before you. And to hear the lamentation of their women. The family agrees. But the poet knows this is not true. He only said it because he is captive. He knows what’s best in life is complete peace. To write when you want. Friends who are better writers than you. A house full of modern poetry. Coffee in the kitchen. And NPR all day. A world without women. And after you have created something truly modern — give up and only read newspapers from foreign cities. Maybe start a correspondence with a young poet who tries too hard to be a poet. Like Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet and write about what makes bad poetry. Especially when your poetry sucks dude! That would be a bunch of fun.

Night's on. The full moon is out. The poet thinks if he tries hard enough he can become a werewolf. No. He curses his unresponsive body and retreats back into his mind. Sleep. But he is kicked awake by his jailer. He is brought over to the chopping block and wonders if his head is coming off. If I don't want life too bad I won't get hurt feelings. He closes his eyes. Not to want. It’s his chains that are cut. The poet looks dumb. The jailer kicks him. Go he says you're free.

I was always free quoth the poet.

The poet runs. He runs across the shrubby deserts of China into the shrubby deserts of Arizona directly onto the set of Mad Max and the Freedome. There are black dogs chasing him. German Shepherds — a breed that doesn’t exist yet. He outruns them for miles. Finally they overcome him. No they're wolves. The wolves he wished he became last night during the full moon. Wish granted. He climbs a rock formation with ancient statues not completely unlike Easter Island. He sees a symbol carved into the rock. It is a box on a stand like a TV. A witch! He falls through the opening and down the steps. He makes the most ridiculous noises. Skeletons on the wall tell him he is going to get more than laid. He sees the witch. She is wearing a brown diaper.

There's warmth and fire she says. Do you not wish to warm yourself by my fire? So obvious. She crawls on all fours like a shecar. Her dark brown hair is a mane. She looks at him. She tosses magnesium into the fire—a white hot flash and screams from the dead. She crawls to him as low to the ground as she can. There is a tiger skin on the wall — he expects hot‐eighties‐tiger‐sex. They said you would come she starts. The music in the background is heavy drumming. From the north a man of great strength. A conqueror. A man who would be king by his own hand. Who would crush the snakes of the earth. What is it you seek?

A clan of men who eat and shit words.

She comes closer and closer until she sees he won’t back away if she kisses him. He isn’t pleased but not unwilling. She winces as he jabs her. She starts an enchantment. Zamura she calls out to her demon mom. The cave turns blue then purple. She opens her eyes which are now vertical like a cat. She lets out a tiger yell — her teeth are sharpened. She reaches for the poet and tries to eat his face. Wind comes from her chest. She is completely freaking out. He rolls over and tosses her into the fire where she burns instantly. She flies around the cave and leaves in a streak of fire.

Day comes and he walks back into the world. A dad. The poet looks around at the new world. He wonders which way to go. It doesn't matter.

Food a man calls out. Food. He is chained to the wall. I have not eaten in four days. It's a Mexican.

And who says you will? the poet asks. He likes being a jerk. More importantly he wants to see how Zen the Mexican is. Especially if they’re going to hunt gash together. The correct answer is I need nothing and will have it! Instead the Mexican says Need food so I have strength. The wolves are coming. The Mexican knows the best way to interest a poet is to not say what the poet wants. Poets talk about what they want to talk about. Fucking poets he thinks so easy.

Wrong! Don't think about the wolves. They are only ghosts of the external world. Your hunger is not real. And these chains he says breaking them are not real. Come with me and learn the way. Soon you will reach the other side.

The two walk over a mountain and set up camp next to an ocean. In the twilight they cook ancient animals over a campfire. In the morning they run across the wheat fields of ancient China and over the sands of Arizona. They run and run and run both amazed they never grow tired. There is magic in the earth. A city materializes in the external world. Civilization the Mexican says. The poet could strangle him. He hasn't said a word in two days — then that lie. He knows this isn't civilization but a figment. When he sees a city he doesn't think Girls! like we do today.

They enter the city. The people are Mongolian Chinese Viking Witches from evil snake cults wearing Turkish turbans on camels and Asian elephants. They pretend they are talking but only mouth empty words. The poet can sense something inauthentic about the city. Citizens try to sell them goods. But they are on a quest to shed possessions including their bodies. Especially their minds.

They ask a man if they know about the snakes. He is white unlike the rest. He wears a Chinaman's hat but looks British and sounds American. The only snakes I know of are on those cursed towers. He points up to a smokestack with a ring of snakes. They have spread to every city. Two or three years ago it was any other snake cult. Not now. It is said they are deceivers. They murder people in the night. I know nothing. The man then offers them Black Lotus which the poet assumes is an opiate. That's okay he says if I want to feel something ... I'll break my fingers.

At night the poet and the Mexican try to find a way into the tower. They ask everyone. Even a camel. They reach the tower. But out of the darkness a figure appears. It’s a leg. A woman's leg. She reveals her face. She’s trapped. She thinks they’re guards. She’ll have to fight. She pulls out her sword. Her blonde hair blows across her face. She has cheekbones so high on her face it’s a butt. She’s a beefcake Helen Hunt. With her Roman nose. She wears a leather bikini and has one hundred feet of rope. Her long pale arms are the same color as her hair. She only has breasts because of muscle. You're not guards she says.

Neither are you the Mexican says putting away his sword. Thieves like yourself come to climb the tower.

You don't have a rope she says. Ha (attempting a dramatic voice) two fools who laugh at death! The poet puts down his sword. He looks concerned.

The Mexican climbs the tower without a rope. He uses his knife. The poet uses her rope — her butt in his face. They reach the top. The girl goes first and enters a chamber. She’s almost been seen but quickly hides. Women in white robes walk by with candles. They have long monkey arms. Their faces are hidden and they appear to be handmaidens to the girl without a hood. She is the sacrifice. The Mexican follows but the girl motions for them to go a different direction. The boys climb down to the lowest level. They reach the dirt bottom covered in human bones. The poet kicks a rat.

She sneaks up behind one of the skinny white teenagers — snags her from behind. Now she wears her robe. She has a complete view of the ceremony — the handmaidens take off the robes of the sacrifice. Her hair covers her breasts and she is wearing a white diaper. She kneels before the pit. She’s going to dive. She clasps her hands together like praying to Moses’ god. She starts to sway like she is speaking tongues. She is convulsing and becoming possessed. Her bony hips pierce out the diaper. She is excited to reach the other side.

The boys climb through a pipe leading to a green light. They see the orange and black snake. It's guarding the jewels. It eyes them. They should turn and run. They grab as many stones as they can. It rises up larger than the room. The poet strikes. He slams the sword through its mouth. Black blood comes out. It’s over quickly.

The sacrifice dives into the pit. She screams. The snake has been killed. Its head off. Its body thrashes. The poet and the Mexican climb the rope. They are followed by the girl. They reach the top. Their rope is gone. The girl decides to jump into the pool below. The poet next. Then the Mexican. They are free. They are rich. They go to a bar. The Mexican walks between the dancing girls. He gooses a butt. But the poet is with the girl. He's a serial monogamist.

They are at the table with their big cups. The jewels are on the table. Looks like the poet is asleep. She reaches across to sneak. The poet grabs her hand and looks at her. He grabs the biggest jewel — runs it over her hand. You’re like a diamond he says. You're as cold as ice. You're willing to sacrifice. Our love. He’s quoting Foreigner. He’s expressing himself in power rock ballads. Especially when words don't mean anything anyway. He turns her hand over and holds her wrist by the sensitive part. He thinks to himself I want you to feel this. I want you to feel how sexy this is. He knows nothing is sexy — sexy is to think you're sexy. It works. Her hand loosens. Can you hear me? he thinks to himself I want you. He holds her wrist too long but doesn't care. Lingering has made something unsexy sexy — now everything is sexy. He gives her the jewel. He places it in her hand. He sings He's a fool ... a fool for love. What he wouldn't do for love. He’s singing Sandy Rogers. Once a fool ... you got to follow the rule ... always a fool for love. Sounds like a chance to advance the cause of true love. It works like crazy. You're in the movies the girl says try to be sexy. Take that smirk off your face. But it doesn't matter. His arms are huge and she sits on his lap. He peels off her leather halter‐top. But the poet knows how to touch. He rubs her over like a cat. Her skin shines with vegetable oil. Her spine sticks out like a dinosaur. Her butt is like an oxen. How long do I have to pretend to enjoy this? he thinks. The girl realizes she is losing him and puts his face in her breasts. Now. He is in the present. His mind wanders but it is good to be back. She makes a face like she's seen in the movies of people who like it. It drags on too long. This is a kid movie. Finally it is over. But no. First they must look at each other like two people finding each other. Now it is over. He kills her.

She is back. They walk through the elfin village. A tiny midget tries to subdue a pig. He grabs it by its legs. To what purpose? Next two fat guys grapple. It's a wild world. The Mexican has found himself a girl too. More shots of everyone happy. How long is this interminable scene?

The guards come in. They surround the poet. They’re taken to the hall of the King. It is large and empty. The king has a depression. He is another Britain. His voice is nasally and powerful and grating.

These are the thieves you requested sire!

I thought there were three.

Our companion the girl says died in the gardens. Good one. Lions ate him. The girl thinks to save someone besides herself. Unlike the poet who is in his own head only. Thanks to art. The guards bring out the Mexican—the King gets pleasure out of the lie. Do you know what you've done? the king asks. What daring. What outrageousness. What insolence. What arrogance. I salute you. Snakes! In my beautiful city. Everywhere their towers. You alone have stood up to their guards. And what are you? Thieves! And my daughter’s fallen under their spell. She follows them as a slave. Seeking the truth of her soul. She is to be his! He gives them jewels. Steal my daughter back.

When they are alone the girl begs the poet no. To hell with it. Fuck all. The Mexican agrees. Let’s take what we have. I have never had so much as now. All my life I've been alone. She talks like they do in the movies about not losing someone. The poet says no. He gives a long winded speech about family. About fathers and friends and trulove. It drags on. She agrees and will go with him. But in the night he leaves her. She wakes up to find him gone. Relieved! She rubs her hand where he was the night before. Her breasts slip out. There’s nothing better than being free. Of you. She cries a little. It’s nice to know there’s instant justice.

Finally alone again he feels free. He's on his horse. He has his sword and his thoughts. He's like any guy after a breakup feeling so free (for the first week). So many things he can do now he couldn't do before. Man she was so annoying.

The Ural Mountains are behind him. Even though he’s in Spain. The ground is dry. It’s spring but there is snow. Now he’s traveling through a blizzard. And now over Kansas. He spots hippies. They carry flowers and hand him one. They wear robes that are ripped and brown. They are the Children of Doom. Doom’s Children. They are flagellants — scourge themselves. They tell him to throw down his sword and return to the Earth. But we are the earth the poet says nothing is unnatural. He doesn’t accept the flower. A symbol — not real words. Things in place of words. Symbols represent what you want to say ... instead of what you say. Your language is misunderstood. Your language is for assholes. There is a cute hippy girl with brown hair. A dream. He wants to show her the way. Using words that aren’t replacements for other words. Jerks. He leaves the hippies.

He travels. He finds standing stones that look like Stonehenge. There is a Japanese Wizard. He is a hermit. Luckybastard. Hey I’m a wizard mind you. This place is kept by powerful gods. Harm my flesh and you’ll have to deal with the dead!

Can you summon demons? Your words are nothings.

I would summon the demon more ferocious than all in hell.

The poet laughs. It’s not a good laugh. But schadenfreude. Harm joy. The black happies. Like meeting someone and knowing you will enjoy killing them. They talk about Stonehenge. These have been here since the time of the Kings. Domains once glittered like the light on the windy sea. The poet speaks hate. Domains don’t glitter. Or Glisten. And ... it doesn’t happen on the windy sea. Not a moment for poetry. Start over ... and leave it out. Do flowers grow here? the poet asks. It is a set up. His answer will show what type of poet he is. He expects language about the first flowers of spring. Maybe with poison. If he’s a bohemian he’ll mention some as medicine. Too easy to draw them out. Poets you can see a mile away. For once an original idea! Flowers? the wizard spits. He looks at the poet. The poet smiles. They both laugh. They agree. Poetry sucks.

They drink wine out of a pot. The poet drinks too much. Because he wants to.

In the morning he trades his horse for a camel. He rides into the desert. Warrior? the wizard calls out. What are the flowers for? The poet wants to answer that they misrepresent language. A mockery of a joke about something important to him. A reminder to not take things serious. Instead he chooses his words. Only use words that are original. He kicks the camel and yells For a girl! The wizard cackles. He understands language. Symbols aren’t useless.

The poet rides until he comes to an encampment. There are many hippies. They live in tents at the foot of the mountains. They pray like Muslims by bowing. They have the contented air of self‐satisfied people with nothing to do but enjoy greatness. The poet looks at them with a sidelong glance. He is unsatisfied with his sneering. Why snicker? Why not use his words? A line of women rub each other’s backs like at a rave. It is a meditation. The poet travels through them with the flowers in his hand. The words are cutting his hands. I can’t stand symbols he thinks. The children repeat the incantation Doooooooooom. They meditate on their destruction. The poet agrees there is no hope and shit all is useless. He has asked for oblivion before. He has called it down on dead men. But it is a false paradise. For the weak to mollify the weak. Don’t produce results.

The poet sleeps on the ground next to a fire. He has lit his flowers. He wishes he had whiskey. It’s going to be a long night. In the morning he wakes to a commotion. The children of Doom are moving. They follow a group of priests who wear white robes. They are distributing robes — they fight over them. To the death. When they collect their robes they smell them. What kind of cult is this? He grabs a robe—smells it. He walks among them. He nods his head like a smirking shit. He can’t help himself — subterfuge is his weakness. He can’t pretend to be other. The priests walk in a line. Their white hoods look like Klansmen. There’s thousands of them. They are heading to Death Mountain. They reach a large staircase cut into a mountain. Two bad guys walk down the stairs. They are the actors from Spinal Tap. They have long hair and mustaches. One of them is Lemmy from Motorhead. The other is Jeff Hanneman from Slayer. They’re looking for the poet but he is by the reflection pool. A girl asks him What do you see? The poet answers Infinity. Might as well play up the role. I see nothing ... only doom. She agrees. He stands up and is twice her height. What is this hell?

The princess walks out of the mountain and stops at the top of the stairs. She is a babe. She has a snake wrapped around each wrist. Her arms strain.

I have seen you. I have watched you. For a thousand years … I have watched you. Where did that voice come from? It must be Doom. It Is. James Earl Jones steps out of the mountain. He raises his hands in a fey salute. The poet sees him. There he is. Doom lowers his hands which says You may be seated. Like at Mass. Who among you still fears death? Who ... will not face ... emptiness? The poet looks into his hypnotic eyes. He doesn’t fear death. He faces emptiness.

He is grabbed from behind. He struggles. His teeth are clenched. They yell Infidel! It takes 8 people to grab him. They lift him over their heads. The crowd runs away to watch the infidel be killed. Doom gives up. Mass is over. The princess walks forward. She has a skeleton face and two small slits for a nose like a snake. Still a babe. She makes the peace sign and crosses her arms. The snakes don’t bite her face. They’re like jewelry. She is sad. She wants to feel the death of the infidel. She can read minds. She likes to die over and over.

The poet is incapacitated. He is covered in blood. They throw him in the reflection pool — he is heading to infinity. Doom stands over him. Her hands at her side like a shocked mother. I wish to speak to you now Doom says. Where is the Eye of the Serpent? You gave it to a girl? Probably for a ... night’s pleasure. You broke into my house! Murdered my servants and my pet. That’s what grieves me the most! You killed my snake.

You care too much the poet says to ask for oblivion. You lie … with words. You killed my mom … my people!

With a wistful sigh Doom laments his earlier ways. Must have been when I was younger. There was a time boy when I searched for steel. When steel meant more to me than gold or jewels.

The riddle ... of steel.

Yes! You know it don't you boy? Steel isn't strong boy but flesh is stronger! Look around you. There! A beautiful girl!

A babe is standing on a cliff. There are hundreds up there. Doom looks at her. She lifts up her arms. They are lockedin a mind. She smiles — she’ll enter nothing. She steps off the edge and falls 182 feet onto a stunt bag below. The poet doesn’t see the import.

That is strength! he sneers. That is power! Without words. Doom’s eyes are burning. You talk too much. Contemplate this on the tree of woe. Crucify him!

In the desert there is a solitary tree. The poet has been nailed to it like Romans used to do. The poet has lost his mind. He is daydreaming — hallucinating. He believes he is yelling against a country of morons. It’s because of followers that he is here now. Followers of Doom who killed mom. Followers of the slave trade that bought him. Followers of fights that made him fight. Followers of the presented. And he himself was a follower. To get revenge — he followed.

Vultures swarm overhead. They pick at his flesh. He grabs it in his mouth and bites. Its head falls off. The poet dies. This stupid world. It got me.

In the distance there is a vision. It’s the Mexican. He isn’t running fast — pick it up. The girl is there too. They cut him down. The girl asks the wizard Do the gods owe you favors? She wants him brought back. She’ll fight demons. She’ll pay the price. She’s got no fucks left to give.

Night comes and they start the ceremony. The wizard is drawing runes on his dead body. These words are picturesthat summon demons. He mumbles incantations. Speak up! He has circled the wound on his wrist as a location of power. He paints face tats on him. He is tied to stop the demons from taking him. The Mexican has a jug. He passes it to the girl — she refuses. The wind picks up. The clouds turn red. The demons lift his body but she throws herself on him. She fights with flailing punches. Big missing haymakers. The demons are little worms with skulls. They are transparent and tough to find. They crawl on her back — try to take her. She battles without end. She wins. It’s like falling in love all over again. He is back from the dead. She has successfully fought for love — like in magazines. She’s crying. She can’t believe it. But he’s still dead. She hugs his body. In the morning he opens his eyes. She doesn’t waste a moment. The gods she says cannot sever us. If I were dead … and you were fighting … I’d come back from the darkness … from the pit of hell … to fight at your side.

Conan can’t believe it — alive for one minute and this! There is no pit of hell. And never will you come back from the darkness. There is no darkness … only yourself.

He takes a moment to practice his swordsmanship. It’s good to be alive he thinks. Good to taste the tasty air. Damn I love having this in my hands. He sharpens his sword with a rock. He is lost in his own world. Hacking and chopping limbs and heads. Giving good speeches. The Mexican suggests they steal the princess and not kill Doom. They could get away. Agreed? Beefcake Helen Hunt wants it too. She wants to get away. She asks. Conan doesn’t answer. Instead he sharpens. I came back from the dead to kill and they want to keep their lives.

It’s morning — they ride. They leave the wizard behind. It’s not his fight. They ride over the sand dunes of Arizona. The white sands of New Mexico. The rocky terrain of Mongolia. The mountains of Spain. It’s summer — it’s easy. They’ve found the back entrance to Death Mountain. It is the volcano of Stromboli off Sicily which inspired Mordor. They ready for battle. Conan puts his sword in the fire–in order to melt it. War paint is applied to their faces. They arm themselves with every weapon. They are Rambo hiding grenades in their armpits. They hide little knives in their crevices. The Mexican has his bow and arrows. I get to be Legolas! The crawl a hole in the mountain. It is on fire. Inside is a scene of industrialization. Mine workers stoking fires. They walk like Patsy played by Terry Gilliam in Monty Python’s The Search for the Holy Grail–like Englishmen. The light underground is red. They are stretching people on the rack—except they’re dead. Truly wigged friggers. They’re smelting iron — lifting a cauldron of fire. No it’s a stew. They’re cutting human bodies. Soilent Green. They use the head and hands. Weird. Bodies hang upside‐down like cows at market. Conan hates sneaking. He feels like a wuss.

They follow the stew into the orgy chamber. Naked bodies everywhere. Legs in the air—for no reason. Huge pillows make an orgy. Some are making out pretty hard — that’s sweet. They’re serving wine and cold cuts. The gimp wears a mask. Conan looks at the orgy and takes a mental snapshot. There’s a tiger? The soup is green and the body parts aren’t cooked well — they look gelatinous and white. A babe pulls a hand out of her soup and bites into a finger. Disgusto.

There’s the princess! She’s up top with Doom. He’s in his throne not moving. She lays on the floor next to him like Princess Leia when she was slave to Jabba the Hutt. He is in a trance. His eyes are blue from the spice from Dune. He’s travelling. Now his eyes are vertical slits like a snake. His face is bulging. Holy shit! Doom’s face is stretching. He is now a snake. So he was a god? The snake slips out of his body and into the wall. Carrie Fisher doesn’t notice — she is on muscle relaxants. When the orgy notices the fires they don’t budge. They are in the moment. If I were to die right now that would be no big deal. It’d be the best. Conan runs through the orgy killing only dudes. He dumps the stew. A skull pours out. The cauldron falls down the steps—smashes against the wall. Lemmy from Motorhead has an almighty ax and Jeff Hanneman from Slayer has a huge hammer. The guy with the hammer almost smashes his head like a watermelon — like Gallagher. The lair is falling. They grab the princess who bites and scratches and claws. She hisses like a cat. The girl knocks her out with a backhanded slap. They escape.

Doom is back. He lifts his men out of the rubble. He walks out of the lair and watches them ride away. He pulls a snake out of a bag and stretches it straight as an arrow. He puts it in his bow and releases. From a mile away he strikes the girl. She is dying. They lay her on the ground. She pulls the arrow out of her back — it returns to a living snake. She tells Conan to let her breathe her last breath into his mouth. He thinks it’s melodramatic but does it anyway. Refuse a last wish because it is trite? She dies. They burn her body like the Japanese.

He swears revenge. I’m going to chop off his head and toss it down a flight of steps. He wants to send his people packing — walk away from religion when they see their leader is not a god. I’ll take his snake eyeballs and lick them. Cut his body and free his blood. He promises to never fall in love.

They’ve made camp by the wizard’s tent. They use the large stones as a fort. They tie the princess so Doom can see her. He will kill you the princess says. He has seen your fires. He will come for me and when he does he will kill you. Conan wants Doom to kill him. He wants a fight to the death and doesn’t care who wins. Her taunting pisses him off. He picks up a large rock and throws it at her. It smashes above her head. He grins.

They’re preparing. Turning sticks into spears and sticking them into the ground. Conan says I remember days like this when my father took me into the forest. Almost 20 years of pitiless combat. No rest. No sleep like other men. And yet the spring wind blew. He is getting whimsical reminiscent sentimental sloppy. The end is near. It was great being alive. The leaves were so dark and green then. The grass smelled sweet with the spring wind. He asks the Mexican You ever felt that wind?

It blow where I live too. In the north of everyman’s heart.

What the shit is that supposed to mean? Conan asks. Do you mock? Conan realizes his emotions are controlling his words. Screw it — he wants to be sad. For us there is no spring. Just the wind that smells fresh before the storm. He’s said something poetic and hates it. I hate poetry he thinks. Especially mine. He figures he will let it go. He doesn’t need to say it right. He’s about to die. And the Mexican is going to die with him. What does it matter if he slips into sentimentality and trite pedestrian commonplace hackneyed corny stale tired cornballs? His words will be like him soon—lifeless limp dull flat banal clichéd lame cheesy old hat.

There they are the friggers! They came. This is going to be great. He can’t wait to kill them. It’s hard to tell how many there are — 10? 12? 20? Conan picks up 3 axes. The Mexican has placed arrows around the encampment — ready. They’re so ready. It’s five to one. Good odds. They are close. They bear the standard of the snake shitting the snake. It’s hard to tell which one is Darth Vader. Finally. Oblivion. As expected! He waits behind a rock and attacks a rider by surprise. They are cut in half. He does it again. And again. That’s three. Hope the Mexican is keeping up. Conan kills another one. The Mexican has a spear. He gets one. First kill. He’s on. The guy with the hammer hits Conan. It’s a game of hide and seek in the rocks—now you see me now you don’t. He finds Conan hiding behind a rock and he smashes Conan’s head. But it was a trap. Instead he’s spiked. Conan stands up and looks at him. The look in the dying man’s eyes makes him never want to die. He realizes he’s going to die. He wants to have another go. Maybe this time not such a dick. He watches the dying man with great interest. You’re dying he says not me. It’s good to understand. The whole time you were dead. This is how it always was. He soaks up the sight. He knows it will be him that will die one day. It is him that was always dead. We are both shit he tells the dying man.

While he is preaching the other guy from Spinal Tap attacks. Lemmy — with an ax. But it is no matter. Conan has ascended. He is now light and thought. He digs his hand into his chest and rips out his heart. He doesn’t understand. Do you not understand? Conan asks. It is because you are weak.

Doom watches all. Then rides.

It’s night. Doom is in front his followers. He is atop the steps. He looks out over his children. There are thousands of them — holding torches. It is a beautiful sight. Proof of the sublime. And they believe. He speaks. The Purge is at last at hand. Day of Doom ... is here! All that is evil. Your parents. Your leaders. Those who call themselves your judges. Those who have lied ... and corrupted the Earth … they shall be cleansed. Doom’s Children approve by saying Doooooooooooooom. You my children are the water that will wash away all that has come before. In your hand you hold my light. You burn away the darkness. You burn ... the way!

Doooooooooooom.

Conan walks up to Doom from behind.

My child Doom says. You have come to me. For who now is your father if it is not me? Who gave you the will to live? What will your world be without me? James Earl Jones likes telling white dudes he’s dad. What a trip. He’s falling for it. He’s confused.

Have you learned the riddle? Do you still believe in steel? When you are stronger!

Words are shit he says. You talk too much. He hacks Doom’s shoulder. He hacks his other shoulder — rips off his head. He lifts it for everyone to see. He tosses the head down the steps — it rolls forever. The villagers can’t believe it. They turn their heads in shame. They had been worshipping a man not a god. They walk up to the reflection pool and throw in their torches. One by one they quit religion. Without speaking they leave. They set fire to all they see. They still hate everything — especially their absentee dads.

Conan sits on the steps and watches. The princess is there. She wants him. She lifts up her hands in prayer. She is the new witch. As he walks down the steps she opens her arms to him. She bows at his feet. Get up he says don’t bow to me. Conan thinks. He kicks her down the steps. No one he yells ever listens!

Damian Weber is a writer living in Buffalo. You can find an archive of his work on This Recording here.
You can purchase his book a dictionary in the subjective here.

Paintings by Gertrude Abercrombie.

"The Wheel" - Laura Stevenson (mp3)

"The Hole" - Laura Stevenson (mp3)

Laura Stevenson's third album, Wheel, was released on April 23rd. You can purchase it here.

Post Breakup

by LINDSEY BOLDT

According to the archive of my lately much neglected blog, I began writing titty poems in July of 2008. I was newly single and fresh off my first post-breakup rejection, full of repressed rage and burning everything at both ends. I had been living in San Francisco for a year and a half, all the while busy proving that I was more than the latest piece of ass to arrive fresh off the boat into Poetry Land.

Everyone Loves a Straight Girl

Friday fuck-face

weather-beaten clamshell

sand in (send in) your oyster

I got pearls up in mine

Sitting around a kitchen table in The Mission District among poets, and frustrated that I wasn’t being taken more seriously by the male poets of “the community”, I asked the poet Suzanne Stein how my friend Alli Warren and I being the youngsters on the scene at 25 might avoid being seen as merely choice pieces of fresh meat. We wanted men to gangway in conversation, rather than remarking solely on our outfits or taking it upon themselves to explain critical theory to us. We wanted to talk about our writing projects, not be scanned from head to toe by someone so drunk he can hardly stand. This was less of a problem for Alli as she was already well established in the scene, having given many readings and published several chapbooks, but I wanted an accomplice and she didn't protest. After listening patiently, Suzanne looked me in the eye, and answered sternly, “You have to use whatever power you have.”

This made sense to me.

Alli and our friend Michael Nicoloff, also from my hometown Olympia, Wa, had recently come out with a collaborative chapbook, Bruised Dick. One night, in a different kitchen, in Oakland, while a party raged (or fumbled) in the next room, I began to drunkenly tell Alli and Michael, who does not drink, how I loved their chapbook but I was sick and tired of poems about dicks. Why were there so many poems with the word "dick” in it? What was so provocative about dicks? Why didn't anyone ever write about vaginas and tits? Which, God, there must have actually been tons of, but apparently I couldn’t think of any besides Victorian drivel about pale white bosoms. What I wanted was the poetic equivalent of Bikini Kill’s “Suck My Left One,” which I would blessedly find later in the prose work of Dodie Bellamy and Kathy Acker. Alli or Michael must have mentioned Dodie’s Cunt-Ups, which I had not yet read. I continued to protest loudly.

Which, if you’re quick to judge, might answer the question of, why wasn’t I being taken more seriously by “the poetry community”?, but please remember that this was a party and I was doing my very best to perform belligerance.

Alli, with whom I was sharing a flask of whiskey, laughed into her hand and shook her head, while Michael, soberly egged me on.

“Okay, Lindsey. Maybe you should write some 'titty poems'.”

“I could write a ton of poems about tits.”

“If you write a book of titty poems, I will publish them,” Michael suggested, folding his arms and leaning against the doorframe to survey my drunkenness from his typically sober pose.

“All right then, I will.”

Unlike so many plans hatched under the influence of Ancient Age (Bourbon), I remembered Michael’s challenge the next day and did begin writing a series of Titty Poems. Writing short, witty poems that I would later be told weren’t “complicated enough” felt a bit naughty amidst a community so set on disjunction and since I was too busy dodging sexual advances from awkward male poets and too awkward to make any advances myself to actually have any sex, I had to get my kicks somewhere.

Celibatory Handshake

I’m keeping the dick out of my mouth

just long enough to learn to say my own name

At home, in the sanctity of my room, I thought of breasts as beacons. From behind them, the chest emits a warm glow, probably a chakra thing, attracting some lecherous moths but also communicating with fellow beacons by way of semiphor: pulsing lights speaking silent code.

4b.

a device at a fixed location that, upon receiving a pulse,

transmits a reply pulse that enables the original sender

to determine his or her position relative to the fixed

location

blink blink

It was from there, about an inch or so within my chest, where I began to build up a store of energy and power that the poems emerged. I would sit at my desk, stationed in a corner of my tiny cave of a room, usually late at night, and concentrate on that spot inside my body. I curled over my laptop in a C shape, wrecking my spine, and channeling all of that, what I realized once I finally got laid after six months, sublimated sexual energy into very short two and three line poems like a satellite dish. Like Bruce Lee's famed punch — I aimed one inch inside the reader’s chest — get in, get out, sit back and watch the destruction. Poetry works that way too. From one chest to another. 

He’s What I Want in My Pants

I’ll tell you everything

if you just ask

but don’t go, Jason Waterfall

I’m doing weird social things that I don’t mean to

and so I creep

Inspired by the biological ownership of breasts and the children's book Bread & Jam for Francis,  Titties for Lindsey was written in response to lived experience within a particular predominantly female body in the Bay Area under Capitalism. You purchase the book from Brandon Brown’s OMG! press here: (http://ohemgeepress.blogspot.com/)

Lindsey Boldt is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Oakland. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. You can find her website here.

"Tell Me So" - Bikini Kill (mp3)

"Hamster Baby" - Bikini Kill (mp3)

Their Own Lives

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

They called it the slipper club. All of the photographer Dorothea Lange's friends were Jews; exiled for a second time from the mostly gentile areas of Nob, Russian, and Telegraph Hills in San Francisco to Pacific Heights. Lange was not herself among the chosen people, but all her friends were. They were as far from the immigrant Jews in the Fillmore as they were from the gentiles in the wealthier neighborhoods. The slipper club, so named because Dorothea gave all her closest ones footwear as a gift, met outside the circles of power due to the vagaries of a parlor anti-Semitism. They talked of gardening, the arts, their relationships.... It was through these people that Dorothea met the artist who would become her first husband, Maynard Dixon.

Dorothea Lange, 26, featured a high pitched voice and walked with a limp. She made her living from portrait photography. She set a price and never haggled over it; no one quibbled with the results. For example:

from 1932

Maynard Dixon, 45, worked a pot-smoking illustrator whose sketches were featured in magazines with great frequency. His typical day involved waking up in the afternoon, getting high, and sampling the best of San Francisco's world cuisine. After the earthquake of 1906, he and his friends perserved in their lifestyle, almost amongst the rubble. Their neighborhood was called the Monkey Block, and it was razed in 1959 to build the TransAmerica Pyramid. Nobody was in a position to complain by then.

Maynard showed Dorothea the "real" California. He loved wide open spaces, and his representations of Arizona and New Mexico during the period remain quite captivating. She was immediately attracted to his cowboy good looks, his way around children. Her own concept of style always accentuated her natural beauty and minimized her defects. Despite her infirmity, brought on by a childhood bout of polio, she could hike and picnic, dragging her right leg on the ground when she was tired. The only thing she could not do was run.

the happy couple

They were married in her studio in March of 1920. He wore a cape, a black Stetson and wielded a carved swordcane with a stiletto. Their marriage invigorated his artistic career; he completed 140 paintings during the first five years of matrimony, and his reputation as a talented muralist at first grew and grew. The fact that he was nearing 50 as she approached 30, initially a source of Dorothea's apprehension, did not seem to matter a whit.

While others viewed Dorothea as a strong-willed entrepreneur, she did not mind how Maynard saw her — as a gorgeous young flower, a precious thing that could not be corrupted, but one had to try. This did not stop him from cheating on her with other women, often on long trips to the California wilderness he loved. Yet part of the reason the relationship sustained despite Maynard's imperfections was the fact the two kept their own lives.

Maynard Dixon

Near the end of her life she said of him, "Maynard was a restaurant man, a raconteur, a striking personality, graceful, had style, wit and originality. Much of the wit was defensive. Women loved him." Despite his considerable flaws, she viewed her new husband as an incandescent flame, and was most taken aback when his 12 year old daughter Consie Dixon came to live with them.

As a young child, Consie had been mistreated by her mother. At her stepdaughter's age, Dorothea stood out as helpful, kind and resourceful. In contrast Consie resisted her every directive, and found Dorothea's obsessiveness over her home frightening. (In later years, Dorothea would drop her sons in foster care while she travelled with Maynard and her second husband, Paul Taylor.) Maynard simply expected his new wife to care for the girl, who else would do it? To fill the hours with Consie, Dorothea began taking her picture. It looked like this:

consie dixon circa 1920

In light of the fact a child already lived in their home, Maynard and Dorothea used birth control with alacrity. By the age of 29, she decided it was time to have a child of her own, and she gave Maynard two sons. Tensions with Consie temporarily abated when the girl got a job as a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner days after she turned 19. It was the onset of the Depression that would ultimately lose Consie that job and destroy her father's marriage.

Maynard's latent anti-Semitism had driven away most of his patrons, and when the art market in San Francisco collapsed, he could no longer sell his murals to anyone. After losing her job, Consie moved to Taos, New Mexico, and encouraged her parents to follow. Trouble quickly emerged in their new landing spot — neither Maynard or Dorothea had any idea how to drive a car. Maynard broke his jaw flipping over the family's first vehicle.

Taos, New Mexico

Even after that, Maynard tolerated the wide-open spaces of Taos far better than his wife. Dorothea had lost her clientele, her footwear association and the city she loved. The husband noticed none of his wife's unhappiness, and even after agreeing to a move back to San Francisco, the marriage would only last three more years. Dorothea observed in a profile of the family published in the San Francisco News that "an artist's wife accepts the fact that she has to contend with many things that other wives do not." She had her friends again.

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. She last wrote in these pages about Marlon Brando. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Desolation Waltz" - Hospital Ships (mp3)

"Servants" - Hospital Ships (mp3)

The new album from Hospital Ships, Destruction in Yr Soul, will be released on June 18th.

A Seduction

by CATHALEEN CHEN

Frédéric Chopin and George Sand met in a Parisian salon, where Chopin dueted with his musical contemporary and uncredited wingman, Franz Liszt, while Sand smoked a cigar. It’s rumored that as Chopin played the ivory keys with his frail, ivory fingers, Sand stood beside him, enthralled. When he finished, she leaned down and kissed him on the mouth without saying a word.

For ten years, they were a celebrity couple of turn-of-the-century pre-Victorian Paris, among the intellectual circle of Liszt and Eugene Delacroix. They epitomized romance of the Romantic era — passionate, tumultuous and hauntingly sad, much like the melody of a Chopin Mazurka.

Two years after their last, but only, breakup, Chopin died before he could turn 40. They say it was heartbreak, exacerbating a life-long battle with tuberculosis. But his life had always been tarnished by sickness and deep emotionality, which — on a morose and incidental level — guaranteed perpetual inspiration.

Born into an aristocratic family in Warsaw in 1810, Chopin was hailed as a prodigy by age 7.  It was his older sister Ludwika who taught his first piano lesson and his younger sister Emilia whose death at 14 invoked his penchant for dark, ambivalent refrains. Their father died of the same disease in 1844.

He was an expatriate, living in Paris for the last 18 years of his short virtuoso life, though it was Poland that eventually adopted his Military Polonaise as a sort of unofficial Polish anthem. A reticent and delicate man, Chopin was an obsessive artist with a chronic cough, a dubious match for the fiery Sand.

Six years before Chopin, George Sand was born Amandine Aurore Lucille Dupin. Her family had distant relations to Louis XVI and Louis XVIII. By the time she met Chopin, she already harbored the reputation as the most notorious woman in Europe.

She was a Marxist and a cross-dresser, a raging feminist by today’s standards. It was at the height of her literary career when she permanently adopted a male pseudonym. Chopin, sickly and conservative, could never call her by a name as masculine as George, instead opting for the softer Aurore. When they met, Sand was already a devoted mother of two, a political activist and a lusty man-eater — mostly of younger men. Biographers would later characterize Sand as the manipulative seductress of Chopin. But he, the same sickly, wishy-washy 27-year-old musical poet, indeed became the love of her life. And it’s true that he didn’t always reciprocate those feelings. It was Sand who had asked Liszt to set up their meeting, while Chopin initially dreaded the “repellant woman,” as he had written to a friend. “Is she really a woman? I am inclined to doubt it,” he continued.  

At the time, Chopin was involved with the Polish Maria Wodzínska. Well-groomed and presumably very vanilla, Wodzínska was engaged to the pianist until their matrimonial plans somehow fell through. In sensible and convenient timing, Sand swooped in and swept him away.

According to Liszt’s lofty biography of Chopin, the composer put off meeting Sand until he possibly couldn’t. On their first encounter in that dimly lit salon, Sand won him over as easily as history dictates. Both being patrons of art, Chopin was impressed by Sand’s capacity for music — namely, his music.

By the summer of 1838, they were in an amorous and often scandalized love affair. He would play her his new pieces as she nurtured his precarious health. Not to mention, she introduced a new sexual energy in his life. In the following winter, the two embarked on a vacation to Majorca, a Mediterranean island off the eastern coast of Spain. It turned out to be the most troublesome vacation ever, as Chopin fell deathly sick amidst an unaccommodating local culture. The weather was colder than expected, and at one point, the couple, along with Sand’s two children, was evicted after the landlord discovered Chopin’s symptoms of consumption.

For months, Sand cared for the feeble Chopin. She would cook and clean during the day, and write well into the night. When he finally recovered, they returned to Sand’s home in Nohant, where they would spend every summer until 1842.

In Nohant, a quaint town in Central France, they entertained guests and worked on their respective repertoires. It was there that Chopin composed some of his best work, including his B minor Sonata, the Op. 55 Nocturnes and the Op. 56 Mazurkas. As his health continued to fail, their relationship eventually became mostly platonic. A testament to her devotion, Sand — despite her history of intense sexuality and a track record of casual hookups — stayed with Chopin.

But the relationship suffered as Sand grew impatient with Chopin’s ailing health and temperaments. Aggravated by financial pressures and Sand’s now-mature and manipulative daughter Solange, their tensions prevailed. Sand wrote in a letter, “Chopin is the most inconstant of men. There is nothing permanent about him but his cough.” Even worse, in her 1846 novel Lucrezia Floriani, Sand created a male character as an obvious foil of Chopin, but embodying only his despicable attributes: temperamental, jealous and at times, cruel. They had their last fight in 1847, resulting in permanent estrangement. It was a social ordeal, and between polarized friends and an utter lack of closure, they both convinced themselves that neither loved each other anymore.

Chopin held his last recital the following year in Paris, and in the summer of 1849, he fell too sick to compose. In perpetual bed rest, Chopin asked his stream of visitors about Sand, while she did exactly the same in a letter to his sister Ludwika, who refused to answer. He died that September, with Ludwika at his side.  Sand did not attend the funeral, and his heart and belongings was taken back to Poland. Among his items was a lock of hair in an enveloped embroidered with “G.F.” — George/ Frédéric.

Years before their split, Delacroix had begun a portrait of the young couple.  The painting remained unfinished in Delacroix’s studio until his death in 1863, when, for some godforsaken reason, it was cut in half and sold as individual portraits of Sand and Chopin, two great ­— but separately regarded — romantics. One half is a headshot of Chopin, in which he looks into the distance. Sand’s other half shows her upper body with her head turned down to her left. Her face is soft, unfocused and her mouth slightly agape, a strange pose for a 19th century portrait.

When put together, the two canvases depict a domestic scene in which Sand sits by Chopin’s side as he plays the piano. Like the first time they met, Sand is enthralled, captured as almost uncharacteristically feminine. But the portraits, split and cropped, are now separated by the 800 miles between the Louvre and Copenhagen’s Ordrupgaard Museum — perhaps forever out of context, a dissonance irrevocable by melody. 

Cathaleen Chen is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. You can find her twitter here.

"Prelude Op. 28 No. 9 in E" - Chopin (mp3)

"Sonata Op. 35 No. 2 in B flat minor" - Chopin (mp3)

666 Ideas

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Mad Men
creator Matthew Weiner

"Every time we get a car," said Don at the end of Sunday night's episode, "The Crash", "this place turns into a whorehouse." Powerful judgment coming from a man who, with many of his colleagues, spent a weekend in the office high on a cocktail of B vitamins and speed. As it turns out, the Chevy account has been every bit as much of a bitch as the Jaguar account before it, and the new SCDP/CGC mashup agency is sweating, crying and running their way through the halls trying to come up with a pitch that will satisfy their nitpicky clients.

But as the frequent flashbacks to Don's youth prove, the relationship with the whorehouse is complex, and not as easily dismissed as Don's bravado would have us believe. I think we're all sort of done with these peeks into Draper's past: we don't need to see a play-by-play of his Freudian dilemma as the whore who nurses him back to health from a severe fever subsequently initiates him in the ways of sex. If anything, these yawn-inducing scenes exist simply to illustrate Don's last point: a whorehouse is not an ideal habitat, but it's where your mother and your lover live. It's where there's comfort and excitement. It's sexy and dangerous and terrible for you, and it'll keep you — and your agency — afloat.

The episode was hard to follow, partly because it was supposed to be but mostly because so many divergent plotlines tried to sneak in the back door and make an appearance. Some of them, like Don's continuing obsession with his neighbor Sylvia and his habit of smoking outside the service door to her apartment at night, are quickly lost in the carnage.

Others, like the Draper children being held hostage in their apartment by an elderly black woman who wants to rob them blind, are so strange and misplaced that they're laughable. I swear, back-to-blonde Betty and her righteous indignation is what kept me from going crazy this week, as well as Peggy's serene, smiling response when Stan tells her she has a nice ass: 

"Thank you." 

For most of the episode, we're not sure what day of the week it is or what time of day it is, whether or not anybody has been sleeping or whether anyone is making any progress on Chevy. The work becomes an excuse for unbridled frenzy, as each character becomes a caricature of themselves on their best or worst days. Kenny Cosgrove, who opened the show in a speeding car full of drunk Chevy executives brandishing weapons and yelling, tap-dances in response to an inspirational speech from Don. He's got a foot injury from the car accident, but it's like it doesn't exist. In the business, injuries become assets, the worst possible work ends up inspiring the best. They're all taking it in the butt for Chevy. It's their job. 

We're forced to pay attention to Don, but his trip is the least interesting: he merely becomes a heightened version of himself on the job, pitching cheesy lines left and right and striding meaningfully in and out of rooms. "The timber of my voice is as important as the content," he yells at Kenny. "I need to be there in the flesh."

It's easy to assume the role of the hero in an environment where everyone admires you, but the sentiment doesn't extend far past the creative department. At home, Don is the father who doesn't give enough of a shit about his kids to come home and babysit them, or the husband who needs to be pitied and nurtured because Megan isn't sure how to communicate with him otherwise. It's a fair guess on her part, if mother/lover are as intricately entwined in his mind as it would appear. 

Disguises are important. If the strange black woman looting your dad's apartment in the middle of the night tells you she's your grandmother, should you believe her simply because you don't want to fall prey to racism? A granny holding up a bank is the oldest joke in the book, but this plotline felt forced, especially since it gave Sally an excuse to tell her father, "I don't know anything about you." We get it, Don's a mystery to everybody, even himself. Except he's not, so let's not waste Grandma Ida's time. It was really cool when Dawn the secretary had a super interesting life just waiting to be plundered for our entertainment. Now she's back to piling files on Don's desk.

Grandmother/thief, mother/lover, blonde Betty/brunette Betty, Don/Ted, Peggy/Ginsberg. Swapping roles comes easy to this lot, and the only person who is completely incapable of deception — Pete — clocked out early in the episode. We weren't asking for a high-speed chase when we asked Season 6 to get interesting. The frenetic, frequent drug use and its consequences (waking up? getting dressed? taking an uncomfortable elevator ride?) are distractions from the meatier, character-centric drama I appreciated so much in early Mad Men. It may seem like we're moving forward, but we're just running around in circles. 

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about Mad Men. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Asleep at the Wheel" - Jamaican Queens (mp3)

"Black Madonna" - Jamaican Queens (mp3)

The new album from Jamaican Queens is entitled Wormfood and it can be purchased here.

Half Lowborn

by DICK CHENEY

Thrones. Watching an illiterate horse trader learn how to read, struggling over every word, reminds me of so many things, but mostly, it reminds me of Richard Nixon. He was the type of man who you could trust because he was exactly what he seemed. He wasn't elected president because of his charm. Still, he could surprise you with a remark, or a particular sign of warmth. You knew it was genuine because he was a complete dick the rest of the time.

Nixon had people like the Onion Knight, who counseled ethical behavior. He fired them, or made them feel unwanted. Our current president never had these people to begin with. The only advice he gets on a regular basis are answers to the question he poses again and again: "How can we use the murder of innocents for our own political gains?" Even innocents have enemies.

at least her small counsel can read

Relying on the counsel of yes men could get the Queen of Dragons in trouble. Ask Michael Jackson how things turn out when all you have is a group of admiring ninnies in your cause. You'll notice that there's not many shades of grey across the narrow sea. Every single person is 100 percent good or bad, and spends the entire day saying exactly what they mean. It is hard to find a liar in these Thrones, because with 242 characters, including over six Hot Pies, we'd never have time to distinguish the lie from the truth.

jeez New Hot Pie, it's a leech not a cobra

Oh new Hot Pie. You were forced to House Baratheon against your will. Melisandre throwing Genry the precursor to a hot bone was a nice gesture; I recall Henry Kissinger once doing the same thing for a boy he sacrificed to the devil. I do feel that there was a missed opportunity to not have Melisandre screaming, "New Hot Pie! New Hot Pie!" The reason rich men are usually the ones to lead us is because they're used to it.

you should really be bowing to the father of the realm there varys Joffrey's face during Sansa's wedding was absolute heaven. in politics we have something called facials, which is best described as the expressions you have in still photographs reproduced on Drudge. David Axelrod always looks like Goebbels, and in fact it turned out his administration targeted Jews in precisely the same way, which should come as no real surprise. The facials of the wedding party were just spectacular all around even though the event came off super rushed. I made over 3000 gifs and saved them to a flash drive that I labeled "not porn":

where was bronn during all this I don't know

The event thankfully went off without a hitch, an improvement on a wedding of a trusted colleague I attended last month where the only thing anybody could talk about was... You know what, I need to conserve all my wedding jokes for the Tully-Frey nuptials.

It made zero sense that none of Tyrion's friends were even at his wedding, but I guess I should be thankful that his valet wasn't quietly drawn off by Grandma Tyrell. 

I think I may have spotted her poker tell.

Everyone you know or love will let you down eventually. Watching Sansa tell Tyrion she would never want a hot bang reminded me it is time to make amends. I know I've been hard on Bran over these last months. But then, that's just when you start missing everybody. Bran is my little catcher in the rye; he will find a savage teenage love with his mossman, or at least that's what GRRM would do if he was actually interested in depicting real homosexual love instead of depriving repressed homosexuals of their affection for one another. Then again, Robb Stark was not in this episode.

margaery gets a psychopath, tyrion gets a wilting flower and cersei gets a gay. i don't think she can complain really

Cersei broke the bad news to her betrothed; that being that a life with her doesn't involve a whole lot of talking. She did not want to hear what Loras' father had to say, possibly because it was, "You know son, Lannisters can never be pleased sexually except by another Lannister." This she already knew. Somewhere, the joie de vivre of a state wedding was lost.

I could have done without that scene, as well as the pathetic interplay between whore and dwarf. Tyrion giving Shae a significant look when she took his post-matrimonial bedsheets away was so fucking hokey; I mean Jesus, throw Sansa a bone before Joffrey flays her skin in front of his fiancée and all their friends. Joffrey really needs to get Sans a back tattoo of his face with the caption "Killed Ur Dad."

"And just over that rise you will find an Arby's, little girl."

Having Arya be super bratty to the poor Hound really reduces my sympathy for her. Also, her thinking the Red Fork was Blackwater just reinforces the idea that women aren't capable of geography, a savage myth that ensured Hillary Clinton would never know how many countries border Uzbekistan. Reportedly Chris Christie did not run for president last year simply because he did not know his geography well enough, and also because he was worried it would come out during the campaign that he accidentally ate an endangered falcon.

If only frodo asked samwise to share his blankets as often as this poor creature does Samwell Tarly prevented himself from snapping at his impoverished friend when she criticized him for using the word "refer". He took the high ground and said, "It's just the way I talk," the exact same line David Karp uses whenever his mousy girlfriend asks him not to curse at her. Samwell made a critical discovery in the field of white walker killing; he is truly the David Ben Gurion of the Andals and the first men. In my mind I have named the blonde refugee woman's baby Bojangles.

For some unknown reason Game of Thrones eschews the traditional montage sequence which shows events occurring at the same time: for example, it is known canonically that at the very moment Jon Snow climbed an ice wall as he wept about not having a mommy, Hot Pie was slaving away over a tuna casserole, Theon Greyjoy was patiently examining the place his testicles used to be and Samwell Tarly was quietly thrashing himself as his lady friend slept before a fire. The proper music for such a montage was, of course, Green Day's "Good Riddance" or Weird Al Yankovic's forthcoming Riffraff parody.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. You can find an archive of his reviews of Game of Thrones here.

just remember: almost every man who ever lived has died

"Why Am I The One? (acoustic)" - fun. (mp3)

"All Alone" - fun. (mp3)

Gary?

Living For Love Alone

by LUCY MORRIS

At that time he had been satisfying a sensual curiosity in discovering the pleasures of those who live for love alone. He had supposed that he could stop there, that he would not be obliged to learn their sorrows also.

– Swann’s Way

I have forgotten many things already, but I do remember this: to be in love in New York felt like an homage to the city itself, a kind of tribute paid to your surroundings. Shoulder rested on someone else’s on the end seats of the R train, hands entwined on the Coney Island boardwalk — these gestures were a kind of offering, the love for where you lived manifested in your love for the person beside you.

I was often in love in New York. The first time it happened it was springtime and the trees were blooming a bubblegum pink and I had a new polka dot dress to wear. I was headed to Russia the following fall, which meant nothing really mattered, nothing beyond the mornings my boyfriend awoke me with croissants and whispers, or the afternoons he read aloud to me in the small park adjacent to Union Square, not the main event but the little refuge beside it. 

Most of what I remember of this period is that I was young: so young that the coffee I drank was more cream than espresso, so young that when the strawberries I bought turned out to be rotten I was too shy to return them myself. I was so young that boyfriends were really boys and I sat with friends debating the terminology of sex like it mattered and staying up all night was an achievement, not a drag. All of these pieces, the late nights and arguments and bodega coffee and moldy berries, were then tinged by the fact of being in love, heightened by it to a terrifying degree: a dawn was not just a dawn, a berry not just a berry.

There were other things, too, in the years that followed that were not limited to their appearances, objects and occurrences with whole lives beyond what they seemed.

A certain lace dress I owned was not just a lace dress — it was a symbol of something I thought could be conveyed by what I wore, because I was too shy to convey it in speech, a trait that I believe to be not uncommon among the young.

“You could crash at my place tonight,” I offered up to a guy with the same glasses as me one night over fries on First Avenue, and it was just one line, but it was also an entire story.

photo by Blake Fitch

There were keyrings and subway lines and paperback volumes from the Strand dollar bins, a gold necklace and Metrocards and Film Forum ticket stubs, and none of it was what it seemed. How could it be? I was then someone who could offer up with no shame, no embarrassment, no doubt: “I’m in love,” exclamation point implicit in its declaration. I can probably pinpoint the moment when I stopped being someone who could say that with enthusiasm, who came to feel the sentiment belonged to a younger, past self, but what would be the point?

One important March, the boss in the all Russian office where I worked gave me a red rose for International Women’s Day. I thanked him, “Spasibo bolshoye,” and carried it in my hands most of the way home. I thought about taking it all the way but ended up throwing it away into a bin at Atlantic Avenue, because the relationship with the bubblegum tree boyfriend I was going home to was disintegrating at a speed that was somehow both unbelievably fast and startlingly slow, and it seemed impolitic to show up with a rose from someone else, even a boss. I want to say that when I threw that rose out I knew it was over, unfixable, but that knowledge is of the kind that can only be applied in hindsight.

When you are twenty-two and shy and not particularly empowered there are not very many transgressive things you can do, but saying goodbye to someone who loves you is one of them. The first time I did that may have marked, in a meek kind of way, the first real adult thing I did — certainly it was more adult than the job, the moving in together, any of that illusory adultness that sounded good when you informed people of it but didn’t require much courage because it was not altogether unexpected.

It is hard to trace lines from theres to heres, hard not to get caught up in detours along the way––the minor romances, geographical diversions — but it is almost certainly true that if I had not thrown out that rose, thrown in the towel, I would not be where I am now. Wherever exactly that may be.

Lying in bed, swollen with Sunday night sadness, I think of when I instructed an old boyfriend to meet me at Tile Bar very late on a Sunday at the end of summer when all other possibilities and excuses had been exhausted. I wore a teal dress of the kind that could pass as casual but which I had in fact purchased expressly for the occasion, gone on that heatwave day to Forever 21 and emerged with the yellow bag, certain convoluted intentions.

I think of intentions a lot lately, and all the years I thought I had none when I very much had ones I was merely afraid to voice, and I think in equal part of the years I thought I had many that were really empty intentions, vague hopes of the kind of person I wanted to be with no course of action behind them.

That night at the bar we fed the jukebox all our ones and the old boyfriend gave away two cigarettes and late, near close, we went around the corner to the ATM. In my memory we were holding hands, swinging the V of our attached arms back and forth, taking up all of empty Second Avenue. Back at my apartment I offered him the only beer in my fridge, a leftover party Sam Adams, but the beer wasn’t the point; that was never the point.

But goal posts move, meanings change. It was not actually the end of summer, it was early in July, the fifth or sixth maybe, but it was near the end of what would be my summer, in the time I had left in New York. The beer was not the point at the time, but later it was very much the point. I recall then wanting that old boyfriend to miss me when I wasn’t around, but later I would just come to settle for him talking to me.

For a while after that I was afflicted with bad dreams, by the memory of a pale stretch of neck I used to know, by a stinging silence that seemed to spread in the darkness. I was trying to put an end to my preservationist instincts, the desire to record, but the details I refused to write down merely migrated to my dreams: the exact nature of someone’s stubble, the precise route of a walk once taken, the setting and wording of a conversation once had.

photo by Blake Fitch

Pictures of Success

by ALICE BOLIN

Let us now sing in praise of Jenny Lewis: she of the auburn bangs, she of the sweet hope vocal, she of the snow-globe collection I read about once, the child stardom, the pretty sad, she the musical descendent of Robert Smith and Linda Ronstadt, which for our purposes will be a good thing.

She is the heroine of a certain story, one in which hard work pays off gradually in immense success.  This is a melancholy kind of story — it maps a drift from coolness and authenticity that perfectly correlates to “growing up.” Lewis formed her band Rilo Kiley with Blake Sennet in the late ‘90s, and they released their first full-length album, Take Offs and Landings, on Barsuk Records in 2001.  They were discovered by Barsuk band Death Cab For Cutie, which is narratively perfect.  Both bands are exemplars of a musical ethic that is now out of date, only a little over ten years later: one which is somehow both lo-fi and mannered, in which sentiment is too plain to be trusted. 

But a lot of people believed it back then, and a surprising amount still do. With RKives, a collection of B-sides and unreleased material that is the band’s first release in seven years, Rilo Kiley adoration that once lay dormant has returned, intensified by nostalgia. In her review of RKives for Pitchfork, Carrie Battan mentions the influence that Lewis and Rilo Kiley had on today’s indie artists like Waxahatchee and Best Coast, and she also explains how Rilo Kiley and proto-social networking platform LiveJournal are synonymous in her mind. There’s something poignant in that association, something that explains some of the emotions that RKives is stirring — the music of Rilo Kiley wakens the inner Livejournal user in all of us.

I first heard Rilo Kiley when I was a freshman in college.  I was only sixteen and was weird and lonely — I picture me then as one of J.D. Salinger’s hyper-sensitive whiz kid fuckups, which, incidentally, is still pretty much the way I think of myself. I related to the voice I heard in Take Offs and Landings, which is full of an adolescent longing to create a new present, to say smart and interesting things, to leave behind this life that is lame and boring and provincial, to be something profound. 

There is plenty of intellectualizing on Take Offs and Landings, most of it embarrassingly earnest.  “I get inspiration from art, science, and agriculture,” Lewis said in an interview at the time, not at all ironically.  “Science vs. Romance,” simultaneously the most cerebral and self-pitying song on the album, whines that “we’re not robots inside a grid.” The song ends with Lewis plaintively cooing, “Zeroes and ones,” and you can’t help but admire their commitment to the metaphor. “Don’t deconstruct and then fill me in,” she sings later on to the pretentious, intransigent other that haunts most of the album.  To paraphrase Cher Horowitz, Intro to Literary Criticism rears its ugly head.

Getting sick of your hometown is what late adolescence is all about, and Take Offs and Landings describes that strandedness, the craving for movement. Unlike their second album, The Execution of All Things, which chronicles a post-apocalyptic journey from the West Coast to the center of the country, Take Offs spins its wheels, languishing at the edges of the Pacific Ocean. There is an obsession, evident in the album’s title, with cars, planes, and infrastructure, but it is in the abstract—travel is only an idea, either to be longed for or resented.  “And the freeways,/They go coast to coast./They’ve taken away all my good friends,” Sennet sings in the hidden track that closes the album.

The lack of mobility in Take Offs and Landings causes more than frustration — there is a dread in these songs that exudes from the landscape. Rilo Kiley’s teenage alienation cannot be separated from the band’s origins in southern California, a place where the American project is pushed to its physical and figurative limit.  As Joan Didion wrote, there is in California “some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.”  This translates to Rilo Kiley’s bitching that “traveling blows when you’re out of road.” And this is not only an exhaustion or fear of failure — as much as California is many extremes embodied, there is always the risk of implosion.  “They say California is a recipe for a black hole,” Lewis sings on “Pictures of Success.” Didion: “The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself.” 

The Rilo Kiley story is a uniquely Californian one, as long as we are equating California with the indolent apocalypse. Lewis and Sennet, after all, were child actors, representing to the popular consciousness the most exploitive and traumatizing forces of the entertainment industry. And from these ignominious origins we chart Rilo Kiley’s rise and fall from grace. They traveled from California to Nebraska, where they released their lauded, emo-tinged second album on Saddle Creek records, and then back to California, where they put out two slick and accessible records on a major label. We think of Los Angeles as where people go to sell out, to trade their cult caché for money. That is one way to see it: Rilo Kiley is just another indie band that was a victim of its own success. It became uncool to like Rilo Kiley — if it ever was cool.

That’s the thing: their ubiquity cannot completely explain it.  Even during their Take Offs era when they flew under the radar, it seemed like the backlash was imminent. Before the album was even released, their music was featured on Dawson’s Creek, injuring their indie cred before they even developed a following. Do I need to mention that Pitchfork really, really hated Take Offs and Landings? They found it shallow and insipid, essentially too boring to criticize — their harshest attack was “Jenny Lewis’ vocals really drive me crazy.”  “I hate Rilo Kiley because she’s good looking and her music sucks,” my friend Molly recently said in an e-mail, stubbornly refusing to learn that Rilo Kiley is a band and not a person.  She is on to something, though—their prettiness is the real problem.  They are guilty of that unforgivable indie sin, being easy to like.

This is part of why I feel so tenderly toward Take Offs and Landings — if it were cool, I doubt I would have ever identified with it.  I was a precocious child, and it is a precocious album, mixing grunge, country, beachy fifties rock, and electronic beep-boops.  “Don’t Deconstruct” is a waltz that recalls the Beatles’ “For No One,” right down to the French horn solo.  In school, I often felt like I was behind because I was ahead — it was hard not to hold on to the feeling that I was special, a wunderkind, which in some ways hindered my learning to be a normal grownup.  In the same way, Take Offs and Landings’ naïve intelligence makes it all the more dorky and vulnerable. 

I remember reading an interview with Rilo Kiley in Jane around the time that their fourth album, Under the Blacklight was released.  In it, they said that “Science vs. Romance” was among the songs that they would never play live again because it just didn’t feel “relevant” anymore.  The band outgrew the earnestness of Take Offs, but somehow I never did.  The lonely sixteen-year old is still a huge part of me, which is a venerable cliché for a reason. This is why the release of RKives is such a welcome palliative for all the faux grownups of my generation. Who doesn’t want reassurance? As Sennet sings in the Take Offs and Landings’ final track, “We’ve been waiting all year/For someone to just say/Everyone fucks up, it’s going to be okay.” 

Alice Bolin is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Missoula. She last wrote in these pages about Taylor Swift and living alone. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Well, You Left" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

"Emotional" - Rilo Kiley (mp3)

Sky's Not Listening

by LARA MILLS

Three years ago Indonesia erupted in scandal when police arrested the country’s biggest rock star, the hunky singer Ariel of the band Peterpan. Someone in Ariel’s camp stole his computer, and that guy’s cousin leaked several short sex tapes featuring Ariel and his equally famous model girlfriends, Luna Maya and Cut Tari, to the internet, unluckily after the Indonesian government started promoting its new anti-pornography laws. Ariel was sentenced to over three years in prison for distributing pornography, and the social media-obsessed Indonesians lost no time rebranding their favorite son: Peterporn.

I arrived in Indonesia while Ariel was still in jail and, probably like you, had no idea who he was or what his band sounded like or how a celebrity sex tape could be such a big deal as to warrant arrest. I started picking up on his story because people love to gossip here, if not conspire, but there’s no TMZ so people read pieces on the internet or on twitter, or recount what their cousin's wife's little brother who's a security guard in the hotel where Ariel's agent lives says, and it all gets put together in different ways depending on where you are.

I love gossiping about Ariel. I first heard his story over dinner two years ago with a 5’1”, 40-something unusually chatty Javanese woman wearing a jilbab. Since I had yet to understand the nuances of practiced Islam in Indonesia, her head covering made her next words a little surprising: "Celebrity sex ring!" She explained that Ariel took the fall for Luna to protect her, but that actually the two of them were part of this group of Indonesian superstar celebrities who were all having sex with each other, and in the end Ariel suffered for them all. What a stud.

Over time I started name-dropping Ariel in Indonesian social settings because everyone tells his story differently. A parking attendant in Yogyakarta told me while I was waiting for a ride that Ariel had been prostituting himself for money after his band’s finances were shaken by two members quitting. A Jakartan I met climbing Krakatoa added that Ariel had gotten a fan pregnant and, since she was of Arabian descent, was forced to marry her and now needed money to support a family (they have already divorced). I finally met someone who knew Ariel from their high school baseball league in Bandung (there are 240 million people in Indonesia yet this was inevitable), and he told me that Ariel’s laptop had broken and his computer repairman stole the tapes, and it was the repairman’s cousin who leaked them to the internet.

Then one night in Jakarta, as beer became wine and wine became whiskey, a Wednesday-night, Peterpan-soundtracked Glenlivet session prompted a high-class Indonesian business executive to tell me the most sensationalistic version yet: a gathering of obscenely rich Jakartan housewives used sleeping with Ariel as a prize for their monthly collective (“arisan”). The winning woman’s husband was infuriated after finding out and threatened Ariel, plus every girl he had slept with, that he would release all of Ariel’s sex tapes unless each girl paid him $25,000. He released the Luna Maya tape first to prove his sincerity, and Cut Tari didn’t pay because she didn’t care; her husband is gay and everyone knows she sleeps around. Not even whiskey could convince me that any of this was true, but my business executive friend told me something else I hadn’t heard: everything and everyone in Indonesia can be bought for a price.

What is true is that two original band members quit Peterpan in 2010 and took the band’s name with them, so even before the sex scandal, Peterpan wasn't allowed to be Peterpan anymore. In retrospect that's a godsend because the nickname “Peterporn” is here to stay. Now the band is called NOAH, and they haven’t said why, apparently they just like the name.

Ariel was released from prison in July 2012 and Peterpan immediately released a new album as NOAH. Its first single, Separuh Aku ("Half of me"… is you), is playing in every single one of Java's thousands of convenience stores at every minute of every day. It plays in department stores, in the background of Indo soaps on TV, on the sound system hanging off the back of a guy's motorbike transporting chickens from the village. I have been in the forested mountains of East Java and come across scratched up guitar-playing Indonesian kids strumming along to Separuh Aku. Ariel's jail sentence did not diminish his appeal, if anything he's now the survivor of a government people feel uneasy about anyway, and even cooler because he used to be fucking Luna Maya.

I saw NOAH in concert in Yogyakarta in February and it was transcendent. Superficially Ariel's not that cute compared to cute Indonesian guys, he actually looks a little lopsided, but he knows how to work a crowd better than anyone I have ever seen. He has a voice and temper that will melt any girl into a puddle of puppy love. I guess that's only if you can understand what he's saying, which now I can, so I'm screwed. Sadly he was so tired at the concert that he ended up lying on the ground with his microphone, begging the jubilant crowd to start feeling tired so everybody could just go home.

You’re not tired yet…? Why are you not tired?? – Ariel

Ariel is always brooding about the meaning of life and heaven and the fact that we can ask questions to the stars but they’re never gonna answer back. Learning Peterpan songs has given me a valuable Indonesian vocabulary for expressing love, angst and excruciating existential torment. Most recently I have relied on this vocabulary in imagined conversations with my Javanese ex-boyfriend following our sudden and unresolved breakup a year ago. I never saw my ex-boyfriend while I was home in Yogyakarta last time because he's a national soccer star with no sense of his own schedule. He tried to fit me in for lunch between his Friday prayers and afternoon practice the day before his big game against Aceh. It started raining and I declined, but luckily I could turn to Ariel for the exact words I needed: Biar hujan menghapus jejakmu, "let this rain erase your trace!"

Why did I ever date an Indonesian national soccer star in the first place? I should ask Ariel. Does Ariel have anything to say about navigating the confusing doublespeak of Indonesian text messages? No, because luckily his lyrics are much more straightforward: I hope the rain comes and gets rid of you! Agreed, Ariel. The rainy season here lasts from October till March, so I sure hope my next one’s a Christmas breakup or else I’m gonna be out of luck.

Lara Mills is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Jakarta. You can find her website here. This is her first appearance in these pages.

"A Sunny Day For A Lonely Soul" - Peterpan (mp3)

"Menghapus Jejakmu" - Peterpan (mp3)

"Cobalah Mengerti" - Peterpan (mp3) 

Their Dorothea Lange Faces

by KARA VANDERBIJL

Mad Men
creator Matthew Weiner

Neither Sylvia nor I have worn actual clothes for at least three episodes, which is perhaps why I felt a deep kinship with her this week. My excuse is infectious mononucleosis but she's just fed up with her husband, who recently quit his job as a heart surgeon because he is one of the most overdeveloped underdeveloped characters in television history.

When she cries to him that he hasn't been taking care of her, only himself, I bet she isn't thinking, gee, I'd really like to be locked in a hotel room as Don's sex slave for the next 48 hours. That would get me to put on my pantyhose this morning. When you're handed what you think you want on a silver platter, you should send it back roughly 90% of the time.

It wasn't troubling to me that Sylvia enjoyed the first half of the tryst. That Don assumes a woman wants to be cared for by being told that she exists for his pleasure is mildly offensive, but that Sylvia initially laps it up is her prerogative. I don't have the right to tell the woman what she does or does not want. Neither does Don, but his real mistake is to believe that the game can go on forever, that he can take a fantasy and impose it on her long after she has tired of it. 

This way of thinking created real problems for Don this week, as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and Cutler, Gleason & Chaough merge on geographical and personal levels. Ted Chaough isn't thrilled about Don's frequent disappearances, and Don's remedy is to get him stinking drunk while they brainstorm about margarine. 

Both Ted and Don love the business. They love it more than they love either of their respective companies or clients. They love it in the same way that Chevy loves cars: when the old methods or designs are getting tired or boring, it's time to move forward and make something new. Nobody really knows how it's going to work out practically but up until this point (almost) everyone has been going along with it because Ted and Don are visionaries and visionaries are fun and exciting to follow. 

The only problem is that a. it's incredibly difficult to put two visionaries in one room (or airplane) without eventually causing a massive power struggle and b. very few people are willing to keep on the rose-colored glasses anymore. Pete's a dick, but his continual discontent with Don has been the mercury measuring the mood of the rest of the office. As Pete's anger grows, it begins to spread to farther reaches of the board room.

It didn't take much for Joan to lose faith in Don after he lost the Jaguar account, for obvious reasons that become less obvious when you think about how no longer having to deal with Jaguar should have actually made her feel better. Peggy returns to SCDP with the same indulgent disapproval of Don that she's always had, except now she has a major crush on Ted Chaough. I'd make a list of the members of the creative department and whose side they'll surely fall on when lines are drawn, except Ted already fed them margarine toast so it seems like overkill. 

I'm really enjoying Bob Benson's miniature subplots with each of the partners: he is sneaking his way in, although his purposes remain unknown. He got Joan to stand up for him in an operations meeting just by accompanying her to urgent care and by bringing her baby an age-inappropriate gift. I don't know what it is about him that makes all the sirens in my head go off but at least we know he's not very smart. He started by attempting to butter (margarine?) up the male partners when he should have just started with Joan in the first place, and no, not because she's a woman, but because she fucking runs the place. 

The only black character we've seen since the MLK episode was, in Pete's words, "a two-hundred pound Negro prostitute", which... well, doesn't give Weiner much of a vote of confidence in that department. Even Dawn, Don's secretary who is secretly the next Joan, only gets mentioned briefly by Peggy. I know an episode is only forty-five minutes long, but really, do we have to see so many shots of Sylvia's pajamas? Even I've been getting dressed in the morning. 

Kara VanderBijl is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Chicago. She last wrote in these pages about the blue line. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing for This Recording here.

"Bullet" - Young Wonder (mp3)

"Time" - Young Wonder ft. Sacred Animals (mp3)