6.24

A brief sojourn of four days into a headspace problem, I have returned, bearing knowledge. As with all headspaces, this one was created by a friend making an off-hand remark. Russell and I were trying to remember the highest point in the continental United States. I have to admit, I said Pike's Peak thinking Mount Rainier. Russell looked at me incredulously, as even the taller of the two is 1008 meters too short. In fact, the highest point is Mount Whitney in California.
I have had a previous flirtation with high points. On the list of "most interesting" wikipedia articles at a lofty 115 is Jerimoth Hill, for many years the least accessible state high point. That's right. More people had been to the top of Mt. McKinley than to Rhode Island's highest point. Therefore, this whole mess has been stewing on the back burner for about a year now, and as everyone knows, chili gets better with time.
Let's grab a spoon and dig in.

My hypothesis:

I think it's possible to hang-glide from the highest point of Alaska to the lowest point (the ocean). I swear it has to be possible, right? I mean, McKinley/Denali is right there. And doing a little guesswork from the actually incredible lift generated by modern gliders, I would say there might be other states that have as easy a time. I know Mauna Kea is a shield volcano and not super steep, but it's really tall. Maybe you can glide the length of Hawaii. And what about Washington? Mount Rainier is really close to the ocean. I think the feasibility of a state-wide hang-glide is highest in Alaska, then Hawaii, then Washington. Last is Florida, as it shall always be. So: can you hang glide off Denali?

My findings:

Huh. Apparently so. I don't know if they made it from the summit to the water (I assume not--landing in water is a really risky proposition when you're wrapped in climbing gear) but it's feasible. Terrific!

My personal hell:

You know the drill. There's no reason to not get scientific on this. And it didn't take me four days to find Jim Hale. So what did I spend my time on?

First, I struggled to make iWork do what I wanted. Since Apple assumes I am an idiot and need my hand held, I made my spreadsheet full of boring numbers in Google Sheets. Seriously, click that. Then, I turned that spreadsheet into confusing lines and dots. The lines and dots are more confusing than necessary because no matter what I tried, I could not get altitude to take the y value, so the further right something gets, the higher it is. Awful.

The confusing lines and dots took three days to finally make even roughly workable (during which time I tweeted angrily at Apple and posted on a Google forum at 1am). Because I love you and I want you to understand this stuff I've found, I'm prepared to write instead of graph. I need you to know that for the lowest spot, I fudged as best I could. Many are coastlines. I chose the closest and guessed with tidal rivers. You should know that one source made everything possible. You should further know that iWork is for dirty casuals. Sources for information: wikiped (mostly). I'm not hitting every state. You can probably read Wikipedia on your own. Good luck.

The States:

Basically all the work done for me already, so I did it all again.

Our magic number--the feasibility index for a human being to possibly glide from high point to low point in an unpowered craft is 60m horizontal for every vertical meter. That's insane. That should not be possible. But in a modern sailplane with an almost impossibly wide wingspan, you can do that. So: Magic number 60m/m. 

Louisiana: Least hang-glideable state

Highest: Driskill Mountain. Lowest: New Orleans. There are shorter states, and there are longer glides, but there are no short states with their high points so far from their low point. And New Orleans being 2.4 meters below sea level didn't even make the slightest blip. You would need to travel more than two and a half kilometers for every meter you drop, and that's so laughably impossible that I'm surprised we haven't just cut Louisiana out of the Union for being such an embarrassment.

Michigan: Able to admit when they're wrong

Highest: Mount Arvon. Lowest: Lake Erie. This one is another impossibly long glide. How are you going to go a kilometer and a half with a meter drop? You won't. Michigan is notable because for years they hailed Mount Curwood as the tallest point in the state, though who can blame them: Arvon is a record-shattering one foot taller.

Kansas: Not the flattest

Highest: Mount Sunflower. Lowest: The Verdigris river at the Oklahoma border. Kansas is not the flattest state and now it has the shocking distinction of also not being the stupidest idea a hang glider ever had. If you managed a measly two-thirds kilometer for every meter you lost in altitude, you could handily glide Kansas.

Oklahoma: The one Free man

Highest: Black Mesa. Lowest: The Little river at the Arkansas border. Two thirds km per vertical m. I know what you're thinking. "But Robby, Black Mesa is in New Mexico!" Well, it wasn't a secretive research base for nothing. They had you fooled all along.

Kentucky: *Deliverance whistle*

Highest: Black Mountain. Lowest: Mississippi river at Missouri/Tennessee border. Two thirds km per vertical m. The MO/TN/KY border comes at a huge, sweeping bend of the river known as Kentucky Bend. Because the early states were greedy and assumed anything west of them would forever be theirs (how stupid do you think we are, New York?) the border between Kentucky and Tennessee was agreed upon as flat. That meant that accidentally, a tiny portion of land is cut off by the river as it sweeps back and forth along the line. There's an exclave of Kentucky there. Its population? Seventeen. I guess they're not proud of their lowest point.

Missouri: My home state

Highest: Tom Sauk Mountain. Lowest: The Saint Francis river at the Arkansas border. About a half km per vertical m. Two things are of note here. First, I expected the Mississippi to be the lowest point in Missouri, but apparently not? I don't know how that works, geographically. I guess the Mississippi drains into the St. Francis. Second, apparently all the jokes Katy and I made as kids were wrong. Tom Sauk is a true mountain, caused by igneous uplift. It's not as famous as some other igneous intrusions.

Tennessee: Too proud of their mountains

Highest: Clingmans Dome. Lowest: Mississippi river at Mississippi border. One third km per vertical m. The highest point in Tennessee was named by the same man who named the highest point in North Carolina. It's kind of a joke among 1800s Appalacian geographers, which is possibly the most specific in-joke in history. A Civil War general and a professor from North Carolina had a years-long fight over which was the higher mountain in the region: Black dome in NC or Smoky dome in TN. They spent the entire 1850s fighting about it until Guyot nailed the height definitively. He pushed for Black to be Mt. Mitchell and for Smoky to be Clingmans dome. Which one's higher? Mitchell. By 12 meters.

Additionally: There's a single sentence without context or explanation on Clingman's wiki page.

In the early morning hours of June 12, 1946, a Boeing B-29 Superfortress crashed near the summit of Clingmans Dome, killing all twelve aboard.

Massachusetts: I found a lower point
Highest: Mount Greylock. Lowest: Not actually the Atlantic. There are tunnels under Boston Harbor that are a whopping 30.5m lower, not that it matters. (I had to add the lowest elevation to wikipedia. I'm proud.)

Utah: The high-pointer's equivalent of a blood oath
Highest: Kings Peak. Lowest: Beaver Dam wash at Arizona border. We've taken a huge jump in feasibility, which is to say Utah is less impossible to hang glide than Tennessee. Still impossible. 169m horizontal for 1m vertical. The reason Utah is notable is the extreme commitment you need to actually reach the peak. The shortest route is a 32 mile hike, mostly over boulder fields. It's the hardest high point to reach without climbing equipment.

New Jersey: It just wasn't good enough
Highest: High Point. Lowest: The Atlantic. 152m/m. The appropriately named High Point just wasn't tall enough for you, Jersey. You had to go and build--and I am not joking--a monument one eighth the total height of your state and stick it on top. Depressing.

Connecticut: My personal contribution
Highest: ~Mount Frissell. Lowest: Long Island Sound in the Atlantic. 152m/m. How sad is this? The highest point isn't even the highest peak in Connecticut. They literally have their high point marker on the side of a mountain in Massachusetts. There were no gps coordinates for the high point. I literally had to find them online and add them to wikipedia.

Nevada: Even when you have a good idea
Highest: Boundary Peak. Lowest: Colorado river at California border. 136m/m. So, I had an idea. Follow me here: Where is the lowest point in the United States? You've always heard that it's Death Valley, but what if there's a mine that's lower? Now, the list of the lowest 10 mines are all foreign (and mostly South African) and there's no equivalent list dedicated to the United States. The closest thing I could find was the Combination Shaft in the Comstock Lode. It's a tremendous 990m deep! But Nevada is stupid and the lowest point in the mine is still 736m above the Colorado river. Dig deeper, mates.

Colorado: Highest low point
Highest: Mount Elbert. Lowest: Arikaree river at Kansas border. 131m/m. The lowest point is just a gully, but it's important because it's higher than the highest point of 18 states. Even you, New Jersey. Get over yourself.

New Hampshire: A weird distinction
Highest: Mount Washington. Lowest: Atlantic Ocean. 79m/m. We're so close. Anyway, Mount Washington held the global wind speed record from 1934 to 1996, when those cheaters in Australia took the record with a cyclone, which is 100% not fair. Anyway, 372km/h isn't anything to shake a stick at.

The Threshold

Flight Medium	Scenario	Glide Ratio
Modern Sailplane	Gliding (depending on wingspan)	40-60m/m
Hang Glider		15m/m
Gimli Glider	Boeing 767-200 out of fuel	12m/m
Paraglider	High performance model	11m/m
Helicopter	Autorotation	4m/m
Powered Parachute	Rectangular/Elliptical	3.6-5.6m/m
Space Shuttle	Approach	4.5m/m
Wingsuit	Gliding	2.5m/m
Northern Flying Squirrel	Gliding	1.98m/m
Space Shuttle	Hypersonic	1m/m
Apollo CSM	Reentry	0.368m/m

Our magic number is 60m/m, according to Wikipedia, and we're about to cross it in a very unspectacular fashion. Are you ready for the states that are mathematically possible to glide across? We're not skipping states now, so hold on to your bonnet.

Delaware: I am aware of how crazy I sound
Highest: ~ the Ebright Azimuth. Lowest: The Atlantic Ocean. 59.95171196m/m. That's right. If you had an utterly enormous sailplane and the right winds (and someone bulldozed you a path), you could make it to the sea. The Ebright Azimuth is as exciting as it sounds, and it deserves the ~ just as much as you can imagine. The Azimuth is supposedly the highest point of Delaware, but the bureaucrats who had the sign installed put it on the wrong side of the street. The highest point is, fittingly, in a trailer park. I don't know how they missed it: it's actually a wider margin than Michigan's 0.3m error. Idiots.

Oregon: Blood from your pores
Highest: Mount Hood. Lowest: The Pacific Ocean. 57m/m. Mount Hood's height varies by as much as three meters, which is unsurprising when you realize it's actually a terrifying death volcano with the possibility of wiping away most of Portland with lahars (which, depending on if you like food trucks and no-cruelty vegan sandals, is either tragedy or boon). Anyway, the 1850 expeditions gave an (extremely) inaccurate height estimate and reported that, and I do not make this up:

"pores oozed blood, eyes bled, and blood rushed from their ears."

Minnesota: I was so close
Highest: Eagle Mountain. Lowest: Lake Superior. 46m/m. When Delight and I visited the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which I spell out because it's fun to say the initals BWCAW, we drove within ten miles of Eagle mountain. From there, we drove down to Grand Marais. I can confirm that the road does tilt considerably. This one I might be tempted to believe is possible, if the conditions were perfect.

Alaska: Less glideable than I imagined
Highest: Mount McKinley Denali. Lowest: Knik Arm of Cook Inlet in the Gulf of Alaska. 35m/m. On a map, Denali always looked so close to Anchorage. Considering that in the same distance you could go to space and back and that you would take two hours to drive the same at highway speed, Denali is not close to Anchorage. Hang gliding that distance would be a feat of endurance, but the truly incredible thing is that it's theoretically possible.

California: The continental US extremophile
Highest (of the lower 48): Mount Whitney. Lowest (of the 50 states): Badwater Basin in Death Valley. Since apparently the land is basically on its side, the ground goes up four km in a paltry 150km, which means an impressive, if not mind-blowing, 34m/m. Just a side note for lowest points: they seem to all be hellscapes. If they're not the hottest point on their continent, they're the saltiest, driest, and most wind-swept. Most of them contain water that would cause even me to float (which is saying something; my rescue float is agonizingly exhausting because I have to paddle to breathe). Strangely, these hypersaline lakes are not the most salty water on the planet. That honor goes to a tiny lake in Antarctica which, and I am not joking, stays liquid at -30 Celsius. The max depth is a foot and I don't think I'll be swimming in Don Juan Pond any time soon.

Vermont: Their highest point looks like a face
Highest: Mount Mansfield. Lowest: Lake Champlain. 26m/m. I have nothing to say about Vermont. I guess they think their highest mountain looks like an elongated human face.

Washington: Yup
Highest: Mount Rainier. Lowest: Puget Sound in the Pacific. I just have to say that Puget Sound is a foot magnet. I was actually right about the hang gliding (18m/m) even though they don't allow hang gliding in the park. And I hate to douse your enthusiasm by repeating myself, but do you remember what I said about lahars? Well, Mount Rainier is the most dangerous volcano in the United States, and one of the most dangerous in the world. Millions of people live in its shadow, and I'm here wondering if you could hang glide off it.

Hawaii: The only reason this whole list isn't insane
Highest: Mauna Kea. Lowest: Pacific Ocean. In order to successfully glide from the top of the volcano to the ocean, you would need to glide seven meters for every meter you drop. Not only is that possible in a sailplane, you could do it in a conventional hang glider or even, shockingly, a paraglider. This enthusiast's website mentions (hearsay) that people used to glide from Mauna Kea all the way to towns on the shore (Kona). I guess that means . . . I was right. Nobody expected that. You can't do it anymore, though, as the University of Hawaii and the state have banned use of the airspace.
There are a few factors that make my proposition even more likely. First is wind patterns. As wind travels up a mountain, it creates an enormous updraft that can lift flyers to incredible heights. That's called a "wave." Especially around the twin peaks on the big island of Oahu, there are some of the best waves in the world. With practice, even I could hang glide from Hawaii's highest point to her lowest point.
Luckily, we're not done with the list.

Illinois: Insecure about her height
Highest: Charles Mound (that's right. Mound.) Lowest: Confluence of Mississippi and Ohio rivers. That's Cairo, Illinois, and possibly the saddest story any town has ever told. I took pictures there a few times. Two words: urban decay.

But anyway, you're probably thinking: Robby has lost his mind putting this on the list. Well, I have. But have you ever heard of the Sears Tower? Anyway, you could take a space shuttle off it to Lake Michigan (The maximum requirement is a paltry 4.2 meters horizontal to a meter vertical drop [also a hilarious visual]). Even though you can't glide from the Sears Tower to the state low point, you can laugh at Charles Mound, which is 201m lower in elevation than the tippy top of the tower. Just think about that. If you went to Charles Mound and stacked, one on top of the other, 100 RuPauls, you would finally have the same elevation at the top RuPaul's flowing wig. If picturing 100 RuPauls stacked vertically doesn't bring you unbelievable joy, you can imagine 100 Hulk Hogans baring their teeth and flexing or 100 Stephen Merchants waving their gangling arms.

Finally,
Washington, DC: A highly illegal proposition
Highest: Fort Reno. Lowest: the Potomac river at the Maryland border. While Fort Reno is x2 not glideable (it's so low and it's inside a military base), there is a much taller surface to start your glide from. It has the added bonus of being oh so close to the Potomac and being the tallest surface in the district. It's so glideable. You could make it in a wingsuit, because it's just 2.2 meters per meter. So, even though I'm not exactly sure if its even legal for me to promote this, I will give $1000 cold hard cash to the first person to videotape themselves wingsuiting off the Washington Monument into the Potomac river.

Some additional facts: at the top of Denali, I have a gravitational potential energy of 5.4 megajoules or 1.5 kilowatt-hours. That means you could pay an energy company 14 cents to throw me from the top of the mountain, if they could collect the energy at the bottom. That means I would land with the same force as 1.3 kg of TNT exploding. That means basically nothing.

The highest point attainable by an ocean-going vessel is in Whitehorse, Alaska. It's a point higher than 14 entire states.

The distance between Denali and Death Valley is 1/9 the circumference of earth. It's basically the same distance between New York and Los Angeles. It's 1.3 times driving around the equator of the moon.

There are 21 states with "Mount" or "Mountain" in the high point name, and 22 if you count Katadin (a native word for mountain). There are 9 with "Peak" in the name. There is one with "Knob." Well done, West Virginia.

I edited three Wikipedia pages with facts I dug up.

Some websites that I found useful or fascinating but didn't have space to mention:
The USGS talking about elevations and distances.
This GIF of a skull in the second/third lowest place on earth.
This wiki article about what might be the largest elevation ratio drop on the planet.
How to make an Edward Tufte-style graph. (He's the most famous graph-maker on the planet)
This geography-based blog all about the flood plan in Washington D.C.
This page about the tunnels in Boston
And this, the holy grail of my experience, the one true website, the guiding light.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.7

Comfort Inn Ending (Freestyle)
Jhene Aiko. This is Ms. Aiko's third appearance on this top 40. That's legitimately impressive. I don't think even Lana has appeared more often. And the song is good enough, lyrically. I generally see the party songs and the thumpers done by about song 20. That's when the words of the songs really make Stephen feel some type of way. That's when we can actually jump into the lyrics and really feast on the meanings. Well, except for Grand Finale, obviously.
Freestyle: a music form that begs for structure. The rap battles I've heard (few) and improvisational poetry I've seen (more) all read like extended nightmares; one thought jumps to the next without fulfilling its purpose or explaining its presence. The rhymes are often very clever and the flow is unexpected. I know it takes a tremendous amount of skill. But the product is often a Gordian knot, begging for the clean steel sweep of Alexander's blade. Aiko is that blade.
I don't know if she wrote this freestyle before, or if she practiced parts of the lyrics. It's possible that she constructed the meanings and the relationships of lines before she started. Regardless, the freestyle has structure, even if it is only one.
Comfort Inn Ending: a song that only does one thing, but does it well. Aiko makes a claim from a realization. He's not the only one she can love. She's not the only one he was seeing. Each is not the only one with pain. Truth: their relationship is nothing. She explains what she knows to us as we listen. She really loved this guy, but the holes in the wallpaper got obvious really fast. Too many people showed up making claims on him/making claims on her. By the end, she's really jaded, trying to pass off their relationship as being worthless because she only wanted a shoulder to cry on when her brother died.
But. She makes that claim again, one final time: we're nothing. It's turned around, though. Mature.

And I was not only one who was hurting/And you were not the only one with the burdens/But if we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing, we're nothing/Why would you call this love when you knew that it wasn't?

 She's an adult about it. She's not petty. She just wants to know why he thought it was okay to use her. If this is freestyle, I'll buy this song right now because Aiko deserves the money. This is constructed to have a natural progression of thought, to be simple enough to follow, to introduce its concepts slowly and resolve them once (not to drive a point into the ground by repetition).

I only have one confusion, really.
What are the genders, again, of the players in the drama? The narrator is voiced by a woman (Aiko). The lover was told not to trust hoes (a term mostly for women). Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian all had their way with the lover (these are all male names). The narrator left 'Quis, who I assume is the same Marquis from before (male?). Everything is ambiguous until the baby mama bursts in and resolves my questions: the lover has got to be male. I don't think lesbians have mistakes that make babies, unless medical science has failed me badly. Unless the narrator is two and they're switching without switching voices or singers, He has been toyed with romantically by men, fell in love with a woman, got a girl pregnant, and essentially had a very confusing couple of months. Maybe the video will clear things up.
Well.
Narrator: female. Check.
Lover: male. Check. (apparently white, with a black beard and a weird Jesus necklace)
Exes of the lover: (?) Anyway, there were two girls in a really nice Ferrari that Aiko drew on with black wax crayon to look like she was keying it. I'm not sure what was happening there, but they looked terrified. But there's still Dominik, David, Braden, Marquis, Sean, and Brian who had their way with him. It's hard to understand.

Anyway, I have some feelings about when famous people use their breakups as creativity juice. I've done it, but I try really hard not to write about the breakup explicitly. I don't want people to know my personal business, and I really don't want my ex to see what I'm writing about them. That's awful trash behavior, in my opinion, to drag your raw, exposed heart out to shame someone publicly. I still love the way the song sounds, though. It makes me slow and angry and sad, simultaneously, and I just want to hear the story, mostly, and I guess I wouldn't buy this song because I have other things I want to do when I feel like this. Comfort Inn Ending doesn't fill a need for me.

Oh, yeah. Before I forget: update.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.8

Kingdom
Common (feat Vince Staples)
This is a complete poem. It wanders in places, but the necessity of the form (massive stress on end rhymes and rhythm and a love of internal rhymes as extra) can excuse the places where the lyrics drop ideas, never to come back. My post is long, so I cut down on my links this time. Try the video or rap genius if you want more.
The first time I ever understood the old hackneyed phrase "the wrong side of the tracks" was years ago when my dad, brother, and I were going to Oshkosh. We stopped in Chicago and got lost trying to find a museum. One minute, we were on Lake Street, and the next we crossed a railroad and the buildings were all precarious, leaning on the people who spread themselves on the stoop. Dad just said "well, I guess we made a wrong turn," and turned around. Chicago is not the worst city in the United States, but I know it's bad. Kingdom? Chicago.
The lyrics might be from three or four different perspectives, but it might be the same narrator throughout. I can't actually tell. It starts with what rap genius calls a "hood sonnet," which is just a sonnet that doesn't follow pentameter. He starts with an iconic admission:

I do dirt.

We all tryna eat off the same plate/Dead presidents; we want the same face

 This emphasis serves double duty: there isn't enough money to go around, and everybody wants to be white. The hood sonnet ends when he asks for the first time if he could really make it to heaven.
The first verse: is it a different narrator? I'm not sure, because the song isn't explicit. The young man is at a funeral, feeling messed up about his friend dying. Later, when he sees the killer sitting calmly on the porch, the narrator "can't afford not to hit him," and finds that the same keys that would normally set him free (I assume his feelings of family, religion, and grief) have pushed him into the murder.
Third verse: I'm not sure about the narrator. This one's dead. He might be the rapper or the boy in church or the thug on the porch. I don't know. What I do know is he had no support ("my money ain't straight, my fam ain't straight") and he did drugs to make ends meet. He blames God first for putting him in the situation and second for not lifting him out of it.

You created me from dust, that's why I did dirt.

I think he does take the responsibility for his actions, even though he's angry at God. He doesn't want his son to follow the same path (can this narrator possibly be the young man from the funeral?), and he still desperately wants to be worthy of heaven.

Standing at the gates 'cause I know you've forgiven what I've done/I'm your son: do I have the keys to get in?

Vince Staples weighs in on the last verse: it's his life. "Peep the full interview here."
I thought there was a separate narrator for this one, and I guess I was right. I don't know if I overvalue rap that comes from personal experience, but I always try to give it a second look, just like Eminem's Survival. Vince plays with guns and watches his family use drugs. He tries to be tough and he knows how precarious life is.

So now you know the basic story. The song references the bible intelligently (revenge is mine, sayeth the lord, the last shall be first, the prodigal son, and the gates of heaven) and boy does it abuse the conceit of the keys: keys to a benz, a jail cell, to heaven.
Hype Williams does the video; a story about a young man who starts slow in his family's kitchen and builds to nice cars and strip clubs when: he gets busted. The use of color is strong, all reds and blues like the lights on a cop car. It's set in Chicago and deals with dirt, but otherwise it's not the story of the song. It doesn't add as much as others we've seen, but it certainly doesn't detract. Only one real complaint: at the juncture of the spoken-word poem and the actual song, there's a distracting brea-
k in the music. I think there just wasn't a way to blend the two songs smoothly, but it still feels like powdered cheese in a five-star restaurant.

I don't know how to feel about this song. It puts me in some type of way. I love the choir. I love the metaphors. I love the rhythmic delivery. I just don't know the pain, so I don't feel the aura, so I lose out. I don't think I would pass on buying it, though, just because I would need to play it for people when they need to hear it.

My Acolyte Journey: 2015.9

Luv(sic) Grand Finale
Stephen let me in on the secret of this song: it's dead. The creator was found with this on his phone; the last thing he'd ever make, stripped from his phone after passing.
Somewhere I had saved a folder of looping photographs. Today, I was trying to think of how to address Grand Finale, and I couldn't find my folder. I pulled out old hard drives and plugged in old usb sticks. Nothing. I swear I saved that folder, but it doesn't matter now. I had to search the Internet. After a few pages of gifs that looped but not beautifully, I found a few I recognized and followed the rabbit hole to Kevin Burg and Jamie Beck and their creation: cinemagraph.

Since the Grand Finale is so much unlike any of the other music we've heard in the Top 40, I react differently. I give you the cinemagraph or: pictures that put me in the same mood as Nujabes' last work.

I just hit play on Grand Finale and Delight smiled. "Oh no! That's his music, isn't it?" This isn't Stephen's music, but it sounds like his. I think that's the point.
For other things that make me unfailingly melancholy, see: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Dear Esther, and a triple-header of Ozymandias, The Watchmen, and Frank Dillon's The Colossal Pair. I think I've got every genre in there (song/picture/book/game/poem/comic/painting).

My Acolyte Journey 2014.10b

Bang Bang
Jessie J, with names to make the song famous: Ari G and Nicki M. Yes, the first post was a joke, and no, I will not apologize for re-using material. If a joke is funny once, it's funny at least four times.
I think by now we've all heard this song. It is certainly clever, but I just want to picture the man who would be seduced by this theoretical woman/narrator.

There's Joseph. He demands that people call him Lightning Juice, but people call him Joe. Last week, he came into the club I like and he's wearing one of those--what do you call the big fur hats? Like a sombrero, but neon fur? Anyway, his vest was hanging open and I could see his nipple tats and he's throwing negs at girls to see what would stick. I legitimately heard him say "I bet you'd be hot in Indiana" to a girl and then he licked his lips. I don't know what that means. Anyway, he drinks lots of cheap beer and pees in the hallway next to the picture of Scarface with pasted-on boobs. He's certifiable.
Lightning Juice turns to me after about two hours of this and he tells me this story about a woman who actually came onto him, once. I know. I don't believe it, either, but he paints this picture. Follow me, here. This is a woman who understands words and men. She's using innuendo the way most girls use a straw, and even the way she uses a straw turns Joe on. She's putting him off every other girl in the bar, saying they're hot, yeah, but I'll make your temperature rise. At this point, Joe is pinching himself and wondering when she'll point to the camera and laugh, but she keeps coming on strong. At a certain point, she's gotten Joe's hat off and his swagger wiped off and him out to her car. This is the feeling I get from Joe's breathless retelling of the story: she used him for sex. Not only did she initiate, but she "rode his uh like a Harley," Lighnting Juice's words, not mine, and then just . . . drove away. Good for her, I think. It's nice to see a young woman take command of her sexuality like that, to eschew societal norms of what's expected and to forge her own path. She has bad taste, but I'm not going to change that. Anybody who comes on as strong as she does seems to scrape the bottom of the barrel?
Anyway, Joe's telling me this story when all of a sudden, he goes apoplectic. True deer-in-the-headlights look. He begins to shake, his necklaces jingling together. He lifts a tremulous finger and hoarsely whispers: "She's back!" I follow his shaking hand and see a twelve-year old dressed up like a transvestite trying to blend in at a preschool in 2055.
"Really?" I say, incredulous.
She struts up to him, crossing her legs with each step, and then rolls over backward onto the countertop, her hair spilling over the bar. "I know you want it," she yells in a near-monotone. "I'll let you have it." I guess this passes as seductive in whatever land Lightning Juice is from. He's gone weak and white, and he's holding his hand to his nose to keep the gauge from whistling as he breathes heavily. They kiss, but not the way humans do, with tenderness and emotion. They kiss like moviestars: violently and suddenly, as if pulled together by strong magnets. Their lips move as if someone else's hands are performing the actions of kissing for them, but under a blanket in a hot room. It's not exactly repulsive. As she's dragging him off towards the parking lot, ostensibly to roll him up like a tube of toothpaste, she stops briefly to whisper to me: "See, anybody could be good to you, but you need a bad girl to blow your mind."

Lightning Juice is a nice enough guy, I just don't want to see his heart get broken.

Bang bang is a really cranked up song. Like, if the producers of songs were as stupid as the guy from Spinal Tap. The video is nothing special: a mash of three people and the visuals from a thousand music videos. I do think it's hilarious to see how the number of people with the singers is equal to their investment in the song. Jessie J wrote the beat and I assume most of the words. She's got a posse. Nicki wrote her own words (who else would push her special liquor? why do we care about Myx Moscato?) and she's got two chicks and a helicopter to help her dance. Ariana don't give a crap and she's just rolling around on a bed alone, probably shot three months afterward and in a different state. It's just as awkward as Drake in Anaconda. I wouldn't buy this song because I would be embarrassed to have it on my computer, but I will crank it up (to eleven) when it comes on the radio.

6.9

I walked out into one of those early morning mists. The dog pulled at his lead and wouldn't listen; he was too exited. I don't know what he was excited about, because he didn't get to visit Mount Rushmore. They don't allow pets. That seems draconian to me--I mean, what's a dog going to do to a hundreds-foot high granite butte?--but I wasn't going to miss out for him. The park was open and the day was burning away.
Delight came to take the dog back to the room and I grabbed my camera from the car. I would capture a president's likeness, if it were the last thing I ever did. As I walked to the car, a van ripped out of the mist and came to a shuddery stop a hundred feet away. A young man leapt from the vehicle and called to me: "Help! Can you help me find a way?" I loved his accent: thick, like hummus on pita, and just as spicy if you make it right. I could understand him, of course, but I immediately started rolling his words around my mouth as if I could have his accent, too.
"Sure. Where are you going?"
"I am going here." He held up an envelope, gesturing to the address. I pulled out my phone, to get at the GPS, when

I stopped short.

He looked imploringly at me. "I know I am in the right town, here, but there is no number for the place." He was utterly exasperated, clutching his summons to the culmination of years of hard work and waiting as the gears of bureaucracy ground his patience into paste. I could read the address well enough.

Amphitheater, Mount Rushmore National Monument, Keystone SD 57751

How am I going to explain how to find four enormous heads, carved into existence over a few dozen years by a few hundred men and left, forever unfinished in the weather and glory of endless time? I turned to him. "Oh! This isn't . . . you're right down the road. You follow this same road, take the first big right, and then just up the hill. There will be a big sign with this on it."
"I can't miss it?"
"It's not a house. It's the big heads, carved into the stone? You know, it's on the quarter and stuff."
"Oh, thank you. Thank you!"
I was worried about my directions. You say "Mount Rushmore" to any American and they look at you, stiff-limbed and dull-eyed and just nod, but say those same words to a man summoned for his swearing in as the newest citizen of our country and he'll be two-and-a-half hours early and still lost. I think he made it. I hope he made it. The fog was practically peanut butter when Dad and I finally made it to the monument. We climbed the steps to see up the great men's noses, and even so we got mysterious shapes and not much else. The hundreds of almost-new citizens, early and eager, were milling around waiting for the clouds to clear. As we got to the car, however, the wind picked up. The sun pushed through, and for a few glorious minutes the quadrolith broke free into a new day.
What a way to join a country.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.10

Bang Bang
Cher, covered by Nancy Sinatra as produced by Sonny Bono (what happened there!?)

I don't think this song gets enough credit. The original Cher song isn't actually the heart of the song. I think Nancy really finds the exact way I want to hear the lyrics; it's just slow enough and utterly melancholy. I mean, the wawawa guitar is awful, admittedly. But I really like My Baby Shot Me Down for the mood it puts me in. Finally: this photograph, though.

I would buy this song if they remastered Nancy without the wawawa, because in the same way that neunundneunzigluftballons really benefitted from removing the overdriven 80s guitar and, like, all the hair, so would this song benefit from an update. Sadly, Nancy is dead, shot down by her brother when she was 5.

My Acolyte Journey: 2014.11

Latch
Disclosure, featuring Sam Smith. I really liked this song when I first heard it. It's pumped up and interesting. I like the syncope and the thump. I like the way the music seems to pulse and recede, the same way I imagine a seashore in a dream. I like the vocals. I mean, I like Sam Smith, as far as I know him. The whole song is smooth and easy to listen to. Now I just have to decide whether to be all Tumblr about it.

Robby: Okay, this author is serious. "You enchant me even when you're not around:" that's spot on: I've been in the place where I can't do homework for lovesickness. Aww, and as soon as you come around, I'm going to grab and not let go. That's a great metaphor for desire. I feel the same way when emotion comes and grabs me.
Tumblr: Holy crap, possessive much?
Robby: Sorry, who invited you in?
Tumblr: If you weren't paying attention, I'll back it up for you. Right so, there's like this entire subset of humanity called women, and they're legit human beings, just like men, who don't rule everything.  This song is all about taking control of a woman's body (see: congress) and breaking down her boundaries (see: date rape) and keeping her from leaving (see: abusive relationships).
Robby: What? I don't think that's what the metap--
Tubmlr: Metaphor? METAPHOR!? Wake up, sheeple! The patriarchy couches its misogyny in histrionics and obfuscation!
Robby: No, see because songs have a long tradition of being based on poetry. Any poetic conceit cannot be taken at face--
Tomblr: I bet you would take my face. Just when I put on my hijab, you take the last thing I have left!
Robby: --value.
Tumber: Oh, my gosh it's like I don't even have a voice anymore. You expect me to be rosy white and heteronormative with a balanced mental state and I'm not sure where I was going with this line of argument but I am not prepared to change, not now that I've been oppressed for merely expressing my beliefs that any dyslexic queer-curious fursona should be free to fall in love with a post-operative pansexual pre-gender assignment tree-person with athlete's foot. WHY DO YOU HAMPER MY LOVE!? YOU CISSEXUAL BUFFALO CHIP!!!!!!!!!!!lol!!!!
Robby: I guess, as long as it's between two consenting adults, you just grab hold of that feeling and you don't let go, no matter how hard the world tries to shake you off.
Twombly: Yeah! Trying to peel me away from my spirit animal and half-werewolf priapistic clone will only make my love stronger. I will CHAIN MYSELF TO HIM/US.
Robby: Have you heard of this new song? It's called Latch, by Disclosure. I think you'd like it.
Termeblear: OMG I LOVE THIS #JUSTGIRLWEREWOLFTHINGS

Anyway, a quick google search for these terms:
"Blurred Lines is sexist" 4160 results
"Robin Thicke is a misogynist" 20700 results
"Baby It's Cold Outside is creepy" 1900 results

"Latch is sexist" 0 results

There's no outrage. Tumblr is full of love for this song. Nobody cares about the violence of the metaphor or the message of the conceit. It's like the words don't exist. Why do we nitpick over "I know you want it" and we just let go of

Now I've got you in my space/I won't let go of you/Got you shackled in my embrace/I'm latching on to you

WHAT EVEN IS LIFE
Is it the video? Well, I'm here to tell you WHY there is no outrage: there's a single lesbian couple. "Hooray for no heteronormativity!" Listen, just because there's something tasty in the poop doesn't mean you should eat it. The message of this song is possession and control. If you were looking for seduction and allure, you won't find it here. This song is worse than Blurred Lines, no question. I'd still buy it though. It's bumpin'.

P.S. I'm more interested in the faces: at first, they flashed, and only on members of the faceless crowd. People you weren't looking at would suddenly light up with this anonymous mask for a frame and then it would disappear. I got to associate the mask with people I shouldn't care about. You'll notice that the mask never appears on the six people we're really focused on, until . . . the couple in the elevator and the couple in bed turn to the camera and the masks hold on their faces.
Never the girls in the nightclub.
What is the editor trying to say about the hetero couples that's different than the lesbians? Are the girls the only ones with an actual relationship? Are they the only real people? Are the cissexuals just faking it, wearing masks and looking for physical release, but the girls, having found each other quite by accident, have let down their masks and are looking for love?