Before the bees died

By Leigh Tuckman

POETRY

The trial of Formosus

One of the Vatican’s less noble moments. By Daniel Wright

GAMES

MLB ‘07: Totally Pointless

A game review hidden in a technological diatribe. By Kevin Clair

I suppose I could be called a social gamer; I play games that my friends are playing, because it allows for conversation. Sports games have always been good for that; many is the lazy afternoon I have whiled
away discussing the ins and outs of the Big 12 schedule in the various iterations of NCAA Football, talking shop about the best way to defeat Nebraska in Lincoln and such like. So when my friend Neal purchased MLB ’07 and began telling me all about his slow rise through the ranks of
the Cubs organization, it was really only a matter of time before I, too, would fall victim to its charms.

Anyone who has tried playing any kind of baseball game on any post-NES system knows how troublesome they tend to be. Apparently these titles sell, so perhaps there is a generation gap at play here that I don’t know about; nonetheless, there is a certain romance to RBI Baseball and Baseball Stars that is difficult for any new baseball game to overcome. I’m unconvinced that the bells and whistles of late-gen baseball games can’t be reconciled with the simplicity and elegance of the original (and best) NES baseball titles. Judging by the reviews, EA came quite close last year with its NCAA 2007 title, only it passed under the radar because nobody cares about college baseball. But something about the way Neal talked about it—really, it was the fact he was talking about it at all—led me to think that this game was different.

It wasn’t. In fact, judging by the gameplay experience of MLB ‘07, baseball games have devolved severely since my days playing Hardball 5 in middle school. I started a career in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization (support the home team), and was instantly awash in moronic errors which often cost my team games. The first came when, facing a 1-1 count, I popped a ball up in front of the home dugout. No one came anywhere close to catching it, yet I was called out for some unfathomable reason. The hits kept on coming; having set my guy to have blistering speed on the basepaths, I was pleased to learn these skills were useless when ‘L1′ caused him to instantly take off for second base on a pick-off play, rather than go back to first like he should have.

Oh, sure, some cool things happened, like the time I was brought in as a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the eighth inning with Altoona trailing by two runs, then hitting a two-run double followed by a walk-off home run in the tenth. But gradually, the annoying, easily fixable bugs in the game overwhelmed any positive benefit I was getting from playing it. The final straw came in a game where, with a runner on
first and one out, I fielded a ground ball at second base. Excited to turn a double play to end the inning, I was shocked to find hitting ‘X’ suddenly caused a throw to the plate rather than a flip to the shortstop. Next thing I knew, we were trailing by three runs. I calmly walked to the television and turned the game off; I have not played it since.

In the meantime, I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials for the PS3 version of the game. They’re flashy, of course; the ball breaks through the projection, David Wright hits it into the multiverse, etc. etc. There’s probably a fair amount of bullshot at work here, but at the same time, it is evident that Sony put a lot more effort into prettying up the PS3 version than they did into, say, making the PS2 version anything more than a festering boil. And herein lies the rub, the regle de jeu that have historically kept me out of
the video game world. I was well over a year behind in finally getting a Playstation 2, when I finally did; I tend to be a little sluggish when it comes to keeping up with this sort of thing. I am often punished,
then, when I buy a game that’s set to be a marquee title for the next-gen consoles; all us semi-Luddites are left with a subpar experience. Why even put out a game, if you’re just going to top yourself three months later? I don’t understand.

Then again, it could just be Sony.

(Screenshots courtesy Games.net)

“Read – how there was a ghastly Trial once
Of a dead man by a live man, and both, Popes:
…
They set it, that dead body of a Pope,
Clothed in pontific vesture now again,
Upright on Peter’s chair as if alive.”
  - Robert Browning

I: The Accusation

We bowed to you, and bent to kiss your ring,
while you yet lived and wore the triple crown
for fear of a mere tyrant, not a King
of Kings. When you took on the bishop’s gown
you wore it not as shepherd but as wolf.
You stuffed the See of Porto in your maw,
and for the winter put up on the shelf
a second bishopric, no care for law.

When we spoke out, it was mere politics.
You wriggled out of justice with a vow.
You broke it, and you rose by rhetoric
to Peter’s throne. But lies are useless now.

My snare is tight. This net will not unravel.
Words cannot free you. Corpses cannot cavil.

II: Formosus’ Defence

If blood ran through these veins, it would cry out,
this heart would rage and beat its warlike drum,
these lungs would billow wide, and pump, and shout,
and ever nerve would scream – but all is dumb.
This trial-farce should make the sky go mad,
rain fire and bile to drown your merchant lies.
Thes sea should burst its bonds, devour the land
and swallow you – but all the world subsides.

The dignity of death is buttressed well;
no slander wind can drive it to the ground.
It stands and waits, for Heaven or for Hell,
for judgement day, and ’til then makes no sound.

But through the stillness still I hear a chime,
a reckoning that echoes back through time…

III: Requiem

Half-blind, I thought the corpse was only mud
when limping down the shore I found him beached.
There was no stench, no rot, no sign of blood.
His naked flesh was drained, his skin was bleached.
Three fingers, those for blessings, had been torn
from his right hand. It was the perjured Pope.
I knew a holy body must be borne
to sacred ground. So, with a coward hope

to go unseen, the silty night to hide
my load, I carried him. But we were seen:
A thousand statues of the canonized
line Rome’s back streets. I saw (eyes strangely keen)

each holy spirit loose its stone restraint
and bow its head to mourn a fellow saint.

                 You laughed,
and answered, “What are you doing calling
at this hour? It must be, what, three a.m.
where you are…”

            ”You said that I could call
you anytime.”

          ”That’s true. What is it, then?”

“I had bad dreams.”

             ”Again?”

                      ”Again. A whole
string of them, each melting into the next.
At first, I was a convict, old and grey
and looking back upon my long career
of sentences, for mostly petty crimes,
but for so many that it seemed I’d scarcely
been out of jail a day in forty years.
The later ones were all for drug abuse
and breaking my parole; before those I’d
been caught trying to steal a car, I think,
and before that, snatching somebody’s purse.
My mind stretched back and back, remembering,
until I hit the day before the first
time I’d been caught. It seemed to last forever,
warm and calm, but thick with knowing it
was bound to end, like the one day of sun
before seven long years of ceaseless rain,
like the night a year ago we had dinner
on Lavender Bay, taking little bites,
as if eating dinner slowly meant that time
would slow down too, as if the night would last
and I could stay with you, and not return
to New Jersey at all, not fly back home
at 7:45 the next morning,
not have to live through four more months of winter.”

You were quiet on the other end, and then
you said, “Go on, then. You said there were more?”

“Yes. Then I had a flashback, or a dream
within a dream – I became someone else,
a fisherman living along the coast
of Massachusetts. There were no more fish;
they’d all been fished, or died some other way.
My town had too, the people moving out
as the fish left, unable to survive
without a source of income. I was last
to go, still living in a shack, alone
with the rocks and the grey water, and my wife,
who hated me.”

           ”Your wife?”

                      ”I told you,
I wasn’t myself. I was somebody else,
this fisherman.”

           ”All right.”

                     ”She hated me,
but we were once in love. It was the cold,
and being hungry all the time. She blamed
me for not catching any fish, though there
were none to catch. One day, she left. I guess
I should have left town, too, but I recalled
being a little boy of eight or nine,
one Christmas when the house was full of friends
and family, long before the town went bad.
I remembered the yellow glow of the lights,
the smell of the fireplace and my aunts
all cooking in the kitchen, the chatter
in the background, and my grandfather
picking me up to spin me round and round,
his flannel shirt and feeling like I’m flying.”

“You should have gone anyway.”

                      ”Yes, I know.
They were all dead, and there was nothing left.
What could i do, though? There were no more fish,
not there or anywhere along the coast,
so what was left for me? I felt useless,
defeated, like the aging coal miner
after the mine shuts down, and all he has
is severance pay, and his black lung, and death
to look forward to. At some point you say,
‘There’s nothing left, and never will again
be anything left,’ and so you stay on,
trying to pretend the memory
of being happy brings you happiness…”

“I think it’s worse that way.”

                    ”I’m sure it is.
It’s tempting, though, to wallow in your grief.”

“I guess it’s like the way when you break up
with someone who you really thought you loved,
you half don’t want the pain to go away
because you don’t want to forget how much
you cared about her, before it all went bad.”

“Exactly.”

         ”Well. Was that the final dream?”

“No, there’s one more. Just before I woke up
I had a dream, or more a memory,
of standing in your kitchen making tea.
I’d bought that jar of honey, you remember,
the one with the piece of honeycomb inside?”

“I recall.”

            ”I put a spoonful of it in my mug,
then licked the spoon. I can taste how it tasted
even now, half-melting off the spoon into
my mouth, sticky and sweet and somehow almost
smooth, almost golden, like the color was
the taste, like sugar but warmer, like nothing
that makind could ever make… and then
using the spoon to skim the melted wax
that rose to the top of my cup away,
flicking it with a finger to the sink.”

We sat in silence for a moment, then;
you perhaps unsure of what to say,
me remembering what felt a better time,
a year ago, before the prices rose
for honey and for almonds, back before
I left Australia and the comfort of
your presence and the jacaranda trees,
before the world was running out of bees.

“I’m sorry, babe,” you whispered through the phone,
your voice sounding very small and far away.

“I know. Me too,” I answered quietly,
and after a moment added, “I miss you.”

“I know. I miss you too,” you said, and then,
“I need to head to dinner soon, and you
should try to go back to bed.”

                     I nodded,
though you couldn’t see it, and replied,
“Okay. Enjoy your meal.”

                ”Thanks. Sleep well, Leigh.”

“Goodnight.” I put the phone away and sat
back in my bed, and closed my eyes, and tried
to pretend I was not sitting alone.

A thousand words: The Dismemberment Plan

A story of a band, a picture, and everything in between. By Kevin Clair

POETRY

The warrior pope on his deathbed

On the final words of Pope Julius II.  By Daniel Wright

THOUGHTS

Age is a state of mind, and I’m old

Reflections on the first intermission in the hockey game of life.  By Neal Schuster

LISTS

Ten things which may or may not happen when the Québécois successfully take over Canada

An alternate history.  By Kevin Clair

Those crimes will live long past my dying breath.
I hold no hope of Heaven. I will not
accept forgiveness. I will suffer death,
eternal death, no mere three days of rot.

My offering of flesh more dearly priced,
by sin I will become a second, greater Christ.

2. Parliament convenes in special session to rename all English place-names; particular highlights include ‘Chapeau-de-Médecine’ and ‘Mâchoire d’Orignaux.’ The session ends in stalemate over the proper translation of ‘Flin Flon.’

3. All mail service to Vancouver is delayed six months owing to Ottawa changing the name of the province to Colombie Francaise and not telling anyone.

4. In a desperate bid for legitimacy, the Liberal Party nominates Youppi! as their candidate for Prime Minister. Winning in a landslide, he promptly defects to the Parti Québécois and spends the next twelve months dancing the Hustle in front of Paul Martin’s house. No explanation is given.

5. On what would be his final broadcast of Hockey Night in Canada, Don Cherry accuses unnamed French Canadians of not being ‘real Canadians’ because they insist on wearing visors on their helmets when they play hockey. That night, he is kidnapped in his home by FLQ paramilitaries and taken to an undisclosed location; he is never heard from again. Who’s the real Canadian now?

6. All Canadian musicians are required by law to record French and English versions of their records. Hipsters throughout North America enroll in French language courses in record numbers in order to understand the contents of the new Wolf Parade album.

7. The Montréal Expos win the World Series.

8. Canada will still have socialized health care for all citizens.

9. Tim Hortons is bought out by a venture capital partnership from Montréal and is transformed from a coffee-and-doughnuts chain into an upscale creperie. Furious at this repurposing, the rest of Canada decides to invade Quebec and settle this once and for all. Troops gather on the banks of the Ottawa River on the day of the battle, ready for anything. However, they have gone so long without fighting conventional warfare that neither side is entirely sure of the rules of engagement. An awkward pause settles over the arena. This lasts for roughly seven hours, at which time someone suggests that a hockey game between the Toronto Maple Leafs and Montréal Canadiens would be best to settle the dispute. The game ends in a tie, and both sides return home, unsure of what it was they were so upset about in the first place.

10. In Saskatchewan, no one suspects a thing.

More dramatically, having attained to the age of twenty five years, and been seven years a citizen of the United States, I am now qualified to become a member of the United States House of Representatives! This is akin to the savings bond you got at age ten, when $50 or $100 is almost more money than you could even imagine so it’s all terribly exciting. But, as you have no way of accessing it to buy Transformers, in the course of the next decade you forget about it until, when you do finally remember, your youthful hopes and dreams and plastic toys in ruins, it only buys you enough coke to forget that you remembered. Honestly, what little kid without a trust fund grows up dreaming to be a member of Congress just as soon as he turns 25? In my fifth-grade class, there was only one, and he got beaten up every day at recess.

There may be those among you who would say “but you’re 25, in the prime of life! Stop complaining, go forth and seize the day!” To these individuals, I tell you that I hate Horace and I don’t eat world oysters. Here is a bucketful of raspberries, please keep reading. But more than that, birthdays aren’t about inspiring your friends and family to take that last long shot at their wildest wishes, they’re about consoling them when things don’t work out the way they wanted. In my family, at least. We drink a lot.

But enough with these trivialities. As everyone knows, the real issues at birthday-time are the consolation prizes of Cake, Party, and Presents, and as long as all three are involved, usually the aging process isn’t so bad. (Incidentally, in my view, the simplest and most elegant solution to the threefold question is the procurement of a cake with a nude female inside. Not that I’m casting any aspersions on the party efforts of my friends and family; I’m just sayin’.) At any rate, for my quarter-century anniversary, there were a number of small cakes, people called and whatnot, and I think I’m getting some airplane tickets? Batting .500 on each part isn’t so bad, though I may be only saying that on account of my mellow old age.

What I’m trying to put my finger on, I think, is that despite protestations from every quarter (or at least the older ones), I maintain that I am now officially Old, a state I would define as “anticipating future life less than future death.” In fact, I’ve been old for a couple of years now, and I think I can pinpoint exactly when any person becomes old. When? On the first birthday they’re not excited to turn whatever year old it is they are turning. This age may vary, naturally, like lifespan, and my working (and quite unprovable) hypothesis is that the moment is like the turning of an hourglass, when the second half of one’s sands start unmistakably slipping away. It would certainly explain the phenomenon of “midlife crisis.” But check back with me in a quarter-century; if I’m right, I’ll be dead.

At any rate, the only milestone birthday coming up now that I’m House-eligible (not including 30, The Official Death of Being Even Nominally Young and the reason a disproportionate number of females are 29), will be at 35, when I, assuming I’ve fallen into a few tens of millions of dollars, can run for President. Past 35, the only gates left unopened are those of Saint Peter and the PGA Senior Tour. All I know is, there had better be some big damn cakes at those parties.

God, I’m so old.

It is not one of my better pictures; from a technical standpoint, I would probably rate it among my worst. The exposure is all wrong, the lighting isn’t any good, and it doesn’t even begin to focus on anything. No one will list this among their Flickr favorites. And that’s okay. The importance of this shot goes well beyond whether it turned out the way I wanted; in many ways, it captures a moment better than most pictures I have ever taken.

And thus begins the story of how I improbably saw the Dismemberment Plan last month.

I.I like to think every indie kid has a story of when and how they turned out the way they are. Mine takes place the summer after I graduated from high school. Having grown tired of the radio, and not as excited by all my old Beatles records as I used to be, I was both open-minded toward new sounds and vulnerable to falling for someone new. I had been turned on to electronic music by a friend of mine who lived downstairs, and while I respected all the old Orbital and Aphex Twin albums he had lent to me (The Richard D. James Album still rates among my favorites), nothing really dug their way into my heart the way Revolver had when I was thirteen.

It was while I was in this frame of mind that, walking into the Sam Goody store that may or may not still exist in the Peru Mall, I whimsically purchased a copy of If You’re Feeling Sinister. I took it home, listened to it once, and then listened to it for the rest of the summer. This was it, you guys. This was what I’d been looking for. Those catchy melodies! Those hyper-literate lyrics! Those tortured, yet super-cool characters! Stuart Murdoch understood me. Nothing was ever going to be the same.

I haven’t mentioned the Plan yet; you must understand, I am setting the stage. It was with this schoolboy enthusiasm for Matador Records that I enrolled at Carleton College in the fall of 2000, immediately taking on the radio show at KRLX that would be a once-weekly fixture of my life for the next four years. I started out simply, playing only the couple-dozen or so bands that I was passionately in love with at the time; there was a lot of Belle and Sebastian, a lot of Beatles, a lot of Pizzicato Five. And I listened; other people’s shows taught me a great deal about what to play, what was good, what else I should be in love with.

I can’t pinpoint an exact, “Stars of Track and Field”-esque moment at which I conclusively and unequivocally added the Dismemberment Plan to my list of Important Bands. Perhaps it was the first time I ever heard the guitar break at 2:50 of “A Life of Possibilities,” or the nervous stuttering lyrics of “Girl O’Clock.” Whenever it was, it stuck, and it stuck hard; by probably spring term of my first year at Carleton, I was playing the Plan every week. And when Change dropped, it only got more intense. They were more together as a band on this album, their lyrics hiding layers of emotional complexity behind the dancefloor arrangements; they were almost like the anti-Belle and Sebastian in that regard, at least until Belle and Sebastian released “Legal Man” and never looked back. I find more to love about the Plan with every passing year; they age incredibly well.

Fast forward to March 2002. The Dismemberment Plan are touring with Death Cab for Cutie on the infamous Death and Dismemberment tour, and they are rolling through Chicago during Carleton spring break. I get my ticket as soon as they go on sale. It is to be my first Metro show; every concert prior to this I have attended has been either at Carleton or at a festival at the New World Music Theater. It sets up to be one of the highlights of 2002 for me. Then, on the day of the show, we get a snowstorm. I can’t get out of Ottawa to get to the show, and of course out in the sticks mass transit isn’t an option. I never get the chance to see them again. A year later, they break up.

II.Life went on, as it has a tendency to do. Two months later, I hopped on a Greyhound bus to Chicago in the middle of the night to see Belle and Sebastian for the first time. Two years later, to celebrate my impending graduation from Carleton, I get in a car with my best friend and drive from Minnesota to California to see the Pixies open for Radiohead at Coachella 2004. I have had no shortage of absurd, ridiculous, and amazing concert experiences, for which I have been very privileged.

The Dismemberment Plan were always there, though; if anything, time had made me grow fonder of them. They were always first on the list of bands I would love to see reunite one day.

When the news came that they were, at least for one night in April, I found out the same way most people did; that is, concurrently with learning that it had sold out. I got through, as most folks did, on hopes of eBay sales and the prospect of a second show that weekend. Those prospects came through, as Pitchfork reported the second show on Monday, March 5th.

Incidentally, all this news came at the denouement of a very difficult stretch of my life. I’d finished a master’s degree in library science nine months prior, and had spent all that time trying and failing to land any sort of permanent employment. The day the second show was announced was the same day I officially accepted my current job; I literally found out about it right after I hung up the phone upon accepting the position. Two days later, I found myself in possession of a ticket to the Dismemberment Plan’s first show in four years.

It was a good 48 hours.

III.Which brings me back to this picture. Astute viewers will note that it was taken from the stage, during “The Ice of Boston.” For years I had heard other people’s stories about Dismemberment Plan shows, from all the other tales of on-stage “Ice of Boston” revelry to the time Eric Axelson came down into the crowd to high-five a friend of mine because he requested “The Face of the Earth” when no one else on that tour had. Hearing these stories, I had always cursed the fate and turns of events which had prevented me from having my own. Now, at last, I did.

This is the moment, and the feeling, that this picture so eloquently, in its fashion, addresses. It’s the pathology of the New Internet Age, I think, that I even have this picture; I can only be so carried away in a moment, even one I’ve spent years waiting for, without some synapse flaring in my brain to tell me that I need a picture of it. Any old picture will do. And so we have this: indiscrimate reds and blues, Travis Morrison singing about Gladys somewhere behind a wall of arms waving back and forth. One moment among many.

I justify its imperfections with the knowledge that this is what the night was like. Somehow, I had landed a ticket to see a short-list band play a one-off reunion show in their hometown. Somehow, I had managed my way to the front of the stage. Somehow, I had found my way on stage, to rock out with a few dozen of my best friends I will never see again. And somehow, I have this picture of it. And I cherish it, for two reasons. First, it reflects what was going through my mind throughout this whole show; it was an avalanche of emotions, of “how did I get here”s and friends and music and joy. One can only focus on so much at a time like that. Moreover, I am an archivist at heart; it is important, for me, to have a document of what will doubtlessly stand as one of the best nights of my life. Many people have Dismemberment Plan stories. This picture, at last, is mine.