Page 30 – Eruditorum Press

January 9, 2020

The Dream King (Tear in Your Hand)

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Tear in Your Hand (1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1992)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 1998)
Tear in Your Hand (TV performance, 2002)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2005)
Tear in Your Hand (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)
Tear in Your Hand (live, 2014)

Preludes and Nocturnes

We all know where this is going, but let’s start with the actual song: a comparatively uptempo breakup song. The temptation to make another Y Kant Tori Read comparison is obvious from the description, which makes the song all the more surprising given how radically far from that it actually ends up. There are obvious reasons for this. For one, “Tear In Your Hand” is, like most of Little Earthquakes, built around Amos’s piano, which offers a jaunty descending riff doubled by Amos’s initial “yai la la lai lai lai lai” vocal line. This is not a song of swaggeringly wounded pride or of pained yearning, but something altogether more trickster-like. Amos is teasing in her vocal, maintaining a sense of humor throughout, as with “I don’t believe you’re leaving cause / me and Charles Manson like the same ice cream / I think it’s that girl.” Amos is clearly hurt by the breakup, most obviously in the bridge’s “cutting my hands up / every time I touch you,” but has already obtained a position of ironic distance.

Musically, Amos describes the way she sought to keep the song relatively still despite its energetic performance: “I heard the music as a steady motion, no change really from verse and chorus, only the bridge that leads straight back like a loop to the same toll booth where you threw in some change to go around only to end up surrounded by the place you left,” suggesting that the departure and return gives a sense of perspective and little more. It’s a good structure, well-suited to the simultaneous emotional turmoil and stasis of a breakup, and slyly foreshadowed by the opening line: “all the world just stopped.”

But the bridge is not the first moment in which the musical steadiness is disrputed—that comes when the backing music cuts out momentarily while Amos sings, “if you need me, me and Neil will be / hanging out with the Dream King.” Neil, in this case is writer Neil Gaiman, and the Dream King is Morpheus, the lead character of his landmark Sandman series of comics. This invocation marks the first moment of Amos’s trickster role within the song—the first emotion other than her stunned confusion at the breakup, and in turn is the first instance of what Alex Reed has described as “Gaiman’s coinciding with a breaking free of patterns in Amos’s songs.”

A Doll’s House

Chronology is tricky here—ultimately the two phenomenon emerged in my life simultaneously but independently, a Bader-Meinhof phenomenon cross-cutting between the two. I unequivocally encountered Gaiman first, somewhere around 1995. A committed Douglas Adams fan left in the lurch by his failure to publish any books after 1992, I made the sensible lateral expansion into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books following the release of the 1995 DOS-based adventure game for which former Doctor Who actor Jon Pertwee had done voices, which was enough to get me in the door.…

January 6, 2020

Spyfall Part Two Review

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And lo, the “It has been __ episodes since we transmitted a complete piece of shit” board in Chibnall’s office ticks upwards to 3 without unduly threatening to actually be good. Spyfall is much like “End of Days” and “Exit Wounds” in this regard—not so much competent as non-incompetent, television stitched together by someone who has seen enough of it to know where all the pieces are supposed to go, but who has at best a hazy understanding of why they go where they do or what their purpose is.

As with a lot of things that work this way—I made the same comparison last episode, but J.J. Abrams really is an obvious example—this results in a story that is mostly about whatever previous text the writer pinned up on their bulletin board as the model they’re going to emulate. Just like last week pinched set pieces from The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky and Army of Ghosts, this week we do Last of the Time Lords/The Sound of Drums and The Big Bang. Which, hey, nice to actually see Moffat get pilfered instead of undone. But on a broader scale, Chibnall’s main idea here seems to be nostalgia for the Davies era. On one level, fair enough. Last of the Time Lords was 13 years ago. That’s plenty of elapsed time for a nostalgia tour. On the other, the idea of Doctor Who during the Key to Time era slavishly recreating The War Machines would have felt jarring, and that’s roughly what’s happening here. It’s not that the statute of limitations on repeating this stuff has expired, it’s just that when the show has gone for an emphatic remake of past glories like this it’s never been a good thing—think Planet of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Arc of Infinity, or Attack of the Cybermen. Regardless of how good the stories are—and in no case has the answer been “very,” it’s just not a good sign for the show’s conceptual health when it’s being used as a vehicle for self-imitation. And yet here we are: a blithely homicidal Master, a destroyed Gallifrey, and secrets from Gallifrey’s ancient past.

I should stress that the problem here is imitation, not reference. This isn’t The Three Doctors or Remembrance of the Daleks or Hell Bent, remixing the past into something strange and new. This is a cynical feeling calculation—the show was a big pop culture hit during the Davies era, so if we do things exactly like they did then we’ll magically summon the audience back. Hey, we’ll even put the non-consensual mind wipes back in. As I’m writing this the overnights aren’t in yet, but one sincerely doubts this is going to work.

And yet, as mentioned, badness isn’t the problem this is having. In some ways this is a pity. Plenty of really bad Doctor Who is at least interesting, This is not that. The closest thing it has to a point—social media is bad—is lousy for all the same reasons the “oh no we actually have to talk” gag in Resolution was—a condescending “get off my lawn” whinge.…

January 3, 2020

Spyfall Part One Review

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It is fair to ask what, at this point, we want from Chibnall-era Doctor Who. Obviously I want $800 a week to watch it in the first place, but since you’ve all decided to give me that, I suppose here we are. (Thanks, by the way. You’re all ridiculously generous, and I’d have felt terribly sad not reviewing this.) But more seriously, we should discuss what a successful Chibnall episode would be. After all, if we draw the line at “be at least as good as Dracula” then we’re just going to be depressed for nine and a half weeks. We’re going to need some sort of notion of what a good Chibnall story might be in the same way that one needs a notion of a good Eric Saward story or a good Bob Baker and David Martin story.

Spyfall, after all, gets a lot of things not wrong. For instance, it has a coherent point and a sense of itself as being about something. There’s not a lot of follow-through on it—no real substance to its sense of “vastly powerful tech companies are dangerous and scary” or engagement with the materiality of these things—but it has a point. There is also no particular reason for this point to be wedded to a James Bond pastiche, but it’s certainly not inimacable to the genre the story is playing with. And certainly the presence of a genre to play in is a good thing, giving the story a clarity of focus and purpose that, say, The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos or Arachnids in the UK did not really have.

Obviously this consists of setting an extremely low bar and allowing the show to step over it. And the show doesn’t even manage this without stubbing a toe on the way, with its middle section being curiously unmoored from the James Bond pastiche in favor of a ghost story in the Australian outback. But there’s a minimum standard of competently constructed television being met here in a way that was in no way routine last year. And there’s a certain acceptability to it—if Chibnall at his best can come in around the level of The Sontaran Stratagem/The Poison Sky (since he nicks a set piece out of it and all) then all right. That’s basically fine, y’know? Especially if the other writers—and it’s a pretty tasty-looking set of them in the middle six episodes this season—can provide some high points.

All of which is to say that things might basically be OK. Series 11 might turn out to be an unfortunately awkward blip before Doctor Who settles into something that’s not as scintillating as either of the eras before it, but that’s at least not so infuriatingly crap that one is left wanting to charge exorbitantly high amounts for reviews in the desperate hope that you won’t have to actually do them. On the basis of part one, Spyfall looks like it belongs to a perfectly adequate era of Doctor Who.…

January 1, 2020

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 39 – Matt Shea and White Supremacy in the Pacific North West (with guest Jason Wilson)

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To round off our first year, Daniel is joined by special guest Jason Wilson to talk about the fascinating figure Representative Matt Shea. Hopefully this edition will please those listeners who’ve been asking for longer episodes!

Content Warning.

Download here: http://idontspeakgerman.libsyn.com/episode-39-matt-shea-with-jason-wilson

Notes and links (thanks to Jason for this compilation):

Kenneth S Stern (1997) A force upon the plain : the American militia movement and the politics of hate. https://www.worldcat.org/title/force-upon-the-plain-the-american-militia-movement-and-the-politics-of-hate/oclc/1002393469&referer=brief_results

Kathleen Belew (2019) Bring the war home the white power movement and paramilitary America https://www.worldcat.org/title/bring-the-war-home-the-white-power-movement-and-paramilitary-america/oclc/1129866369&referer=brief_results (great overview and analysis of lots of things we discussed)

Linda Gordon (2018) The second coming of the KKK : the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American political tradition https://www.worldcat.org/title/second-coming-of-the-kkk-the-ku-klux-klan-of-the-1920s-and-the-american-political-tradition/oclc/1076323469&referer=brief_results (really good material on the 1920s Klan in Oregon)

Jane Kramer (2003) Lone patriot : the short career of an American militiaman. https://www.worldcat.org/title/lone-patriot-the-short-career-of-an-american-militiaman/oclc/52724431?referer=br&ht=edition

David A Neiwert (1999) In God’s country : the patriot movement and the Pacific Northwest https://www.worldcat.org/title/in-gods-country-the-patriot-movement-and-the-pacific-northwest/oclc/493949695&referer=brief_results (Exhaustively detailed contemporaneous work on the militia movement in PNW)

David Neiwert (2009) The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right https://www.worldcat.org/title/the-eliminationists-how-hate-talk-radicalized-the-american-right/oclc/7390575626&referer=brief_results (This speaks to the right generally but is important for our context)

David Neiwert (2018) Alt-America : the rise of the radical right in the age of Trump https://www.worldcat.org/title/alt-america-the-rise-of-the-radical-right-in-the-age-of-trump/oclc/1017576651?referer=br&ht=edition (Best view of the current moment from long time PNW reporter)

David Helvarg (2004) The war against the greens : the “Wise-Use” movement, the New Right, and the browning of America https://www.worldcat.org/title/war-against-the-greens-the-wise-use-movement-the-new-right-and-the-browning-of-america/oclc/53993117&referer=brief_results (Specific account of the development of anti-environmental politics in the west)

Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds (2011) Drawing the global colour line : white men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality https://www.worldcat.org/title/drawing-the-global-colour-line-white-mens-countries-and-the-international-challenge-of-racial-equality/oclc/1052849084&referer=brief_results (Just brilliant in historicizing the development of white supremacy – in thought and policy – across settler colonial societies around the turn of the twentieth century. Pankaj Mishra draws on it here https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/30/opinion/race-politics-whiteness.html)

Chip Berlet and Matthew Lyons (2000) Right-wing populism in America : too close for comfort https://www.worldcat.org/title/right-wing-populism-in-america-too-close-for-comfort/oclc/247742295?referer=br&ht=edition (Chip and Matthew have done lots of fantastic work but this is essential)

James Corcoran (1991) Bitter harvest Gordon Kahl and the Posse Comitatus : murder in the heartland https://www.worldcat.org/title/bitter-harvest-gordon-kahl-and-the-posse-comitatus-murder-in-the-heartland/oclc/1087601191&referer=brief_results

Mark Fenster (2008) Conspiracy theories: secrecy and power in American culture. https://www.worldcat.org/title/conspiracy-theories-secrecy-and-power-in-american-culture/oclc/1087739570?referer=br&ht=edition (Chapter 2 has a good discussion of the 1995 congressional hearings on the militia movement)

James Coates (1995) Armed and dangerous : the rise of the survivalist right https://www.worldcat.org/title/conspiracy-theories-secrecy-and-power-in-american-culture/oclc/1087739570?referer=br&ht=edition (Pretty good contemporaneous account of the different strands underpinning the militia movement and the 1990s far right)

Elinor Langer (2004) A hundred little Hitlers : the death of a black man, the trial of a white racist, and the rise of the neo-Nazi movement in America https://www.worldcat.org/title/hundred-little-hitlers-the-death-of-a-black-man-the-trial-of-a-white-racist-and-the-rise-of-the-neo-nazi-movement-in-america/oclc/1037466174&referer=brief_results (Important account of white supremacist movements in PNW in 1980s and 1990s)

Leonard Zeskind (2009) Blood and politics : the history of the white nationalist movement from the margins to the mainstream https://www.worldcat.org/title/blood-and-politics-the-history-of-the-white-nationalist-movement-from-the-margins-to-the-mainstream/oclc/965823835?referer=br&ht=edition

Leah Sottile (with Ryan Haas on the podcasts) Bundyville https://longreads.com/bundyville/ (Definitive journalistic take on Matt Shea’s place in the contemporary patriot movement in PNW)

Daniel Levitas (2001) The Terrorist Next Door The Militia Movement and the Radical Right.…

December 30, 2019

Kings Never Afraid to Burn (Little Earthquakes)

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Little Earthquakes (1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1992)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1997)

Little Earthquakes (live, 1998)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2003)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2007, official bootleg, Clyde set)

Little Earthquakes (live, 2014)

There are two approaches to choosing a title track for an album. One is to pick something that seems a thesis statement for the album, capturing its major musical and lyrical themes while not risking confusion by wanting to be a single. The other is to pick something with a cool title. It is this latter approach that explains why an album dominated by fairly simply arranged piano ballads featuring confessional lyrics flecked with spots of idiosyncrasy is named after an austerely ominous song whose lyrics are basically wall to wall crypticness.

Much of Little Earthquakes feels as though it appeared sui generis from nowhere save for the interior of Tori mos’s head. There are a few exceptions—the ruins and traces of Y Kant Tori Read and of the 80s at large lurk throughout the album. But for the most part, Amos feels profoundly singular. On top of that, Amos is historically extremely reticent to talk about her musical influences—one is left to infer them from what songs she chooses to cover, and given that her covers are often hostile takeovers rather than homages, this is an unreliable process at best. Nevertheless it bears mentioning that, excluding songs such as “Smells Like Teen Spirit” that were first recorded as studio tracks, Amos’s third most common cover in live shows is The Cure’s “Lovesong,” which has shown up repeatedly on tours starting with Under the Pink and continuing through Native Invader.

“Lovesong” is of course off of The Cure’s 1989 album Disintegration, which is by far the safest choice if you’re ever cornered by angry goths and told to name the best Cure album. And while it’s not quite clear that Amos namechecks the album in “Little Earthquakes,” given that the song belongs to the same set of recordings where she explicitly references Nine Inch Nails and Sandman, there’s an aggressive plausibility to the suggestion that Amos might have been thinking of an album that had only released its last single a few months earlier when she picked the word.

The better case, however, is simply found in the “Little Earthquakes”’ instrumentation. Its sweeping waves of dark synthesizers and deep drums conjure something very much like the drowned and moody beauty of The Cure’s masterpiece. The intro to “The Same Deep Water As You” is probably the best direct comparison, but Amos isn’t engaged in any sort of blithe homage of the sort that “You Go to My Head” was for Prince. “Little Earthquakes” is not using the same soundscape as Disintegration, opting to frame its forboding majesty around Amos’s piano instead of sprawling washes of guitar. It’s the difference between imitation and inspiration, and the fact that Amos has made that leap speaks volumes about how much she’s progressed since Y Kant Tori Read.…

December 27, 2019

The Pain of the Respect Thereof (Girl)

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The traditional Eruditorum Press post-holiday ebook sale is running from now until January 2nd. Details are here.

In many ways the slightest song on Little Earthquakes, “Girl” is hamstrung most obviously by its positioning as the second track on the album. Coming off of “Crucify,” it is doomed to be the markedly inferior of the two post-80s empower ballads. Coming immediately before the jaw-dropping triple threat of “Silent All These Years,” “Precious Things,” and “Winter,” it is subsequently doomed to be forgotten by “that doesn’t make you Jesus” at the absolute latest. That it made the album over “Upside Down,” ”Take to the Sky,” or even “Flying Dutchman” is in hindsight one of the more baffling decisions made about Little Earthquakes.

It’s not fair to say that “Girl” is a bad song. Indeed, individual moments are as fine as anything on the album—the haunting, arrhythmic male vocal over “sit in the chair and be good now,” or the mad spaghetti of sounds that make up the bridge. Really, the overall soundscape of the song is solid, even if there’s a slight degree of overproduction (a problem that arguably plagues all four of the Rosse/Amos tracks, but “Girl” is the least suited to maximalism).

The problem really is in its precise sequencing. Musically, it has the same debt to the 80s as “Crucify,” but where Siegerson’s restraint and desire to foreground Amos and her piano made for a well-crafted pop song with the 80s inflections you’d expect something in 1990 to have, Rosse and Amos’s excess begins to tilt the song towards the same mistakes as Y Kant Tori Read. There’s a profound difference of degree—“Girl” is a mile ahead of even the best songs on Y Kant Tori Read. But the basic error is the same, and coming after a song that does the same sort of thing musically only with vastly more panache is damaging. In the other direction, meanwhile, it also feels like a pale echo—“she’s been everybody else’s girl / maybe someday she’ll be her own” is the same sentiment as “Silent All These Years,” only dissociated onto an unnamed third party and made tentative as opposed to emphatic.

All of this oversimplifies. There is a dark mystery to “Girl” that the songs on either side lack—its skulking piano line laid over a firm drumbeat gives it a sense of strange menace, while its lyrics, with the girl crawling through the shadows, hints at a sense of abjection that makes it clear that this belongs to the same set of songs as “Precious Things” and “Little Earthquakes” as opposed to the cheerier confessionalism of the Siegerson songs. This isn’t simply a song that’s failing to live up to the ones on either side of it. But nothing that it’s doing comes off cleanly and decisively enough to distinguish it either.

Amos has largely seemed aware that the song doesn’t quite do the business.…

December 27, 2019

2019 Post-Yule Sale

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Another year over, which means that it’s time for the annual Eruditorum Press post-holiday sale at Smashwords. But first, a practical word: I’ll be putting another Boys in Their Dresses entry up tomorrow morning. I’ll do one more on December 30th. I have a few more written past that, so I’ll run the series on Fridays for a few weeks overlapping with Dalek Eruditorum, which will begin January 6th.

Currently Dalek Eruditorum is set to run in its 26-post version. But it’s a mere $35 away on Patreon from going up to its 39-post version, and has until January 6th to get there. That would add essays on The Crusade, Evil of the Daleks, The Green Death, Invasion of the Dinosaurs, Seeds of Doom, Deadly Assassin, State of Decay, Kinda, The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, the TV Movie, Planet of the Ood, Closing Time, The Magician’s Apprentice/The Witch’s Familiar, and something from Series 12.

Meanwhile, we have until January 1st to get to the $800 threshold needed for Series 12 reviews. If we don’t make it, I’ll do short reviews for $2+ patrons, but the full shebang Eruditorum Press reviews will only happen if we get up to $800. Will we do it? I don’t know. It seems increasingly unlikely, which is sad and weird-feeling, but we’ll see. In any case, if either this or the longer version of Dalek Eruditorum matters to you, time grows short to make them happen.

Right. On to the sale. This year it’s even easier than ever, because there’s one coupon code that affects every single book that I have in print. You can just go to my Smashwords page and pick any book that you want, and then use the coupon code RW23H to get the discount on any of my books.

Here’s the discounts I currently have running.

Neoreaction a Basilisk: $2.50 (50% off), matching the price it’s on sale for at Amazon.co.uk

The Last War in Albion Volume 1: $3 (40% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum, meanwhile, is on sale for the price of the relevant Doctor, as below:

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 1: $1 (80% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 2: $2 (60% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 3: $3 (40% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 4: $4 (20% off)

TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 5: $4 (20% off)

Thank you all for a wonderful year. The support you’ve given me, especially with this spring’s “help me quit my day job” funding drive, has been nothing short of incredible. I have the best readers, and I love you all.…

December 25, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 38 – Charles Murray and The Bell Curve

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Merry Christmas! This Christmas Day, Daniel and Jack chat about Charles Murray, co-author of the infamous pseudo-scientific racist hoax The Bell Curve.

LINK

Content Warning.

Notes/Links:

Shaun, “The Bell Curve.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBc7qBS1Ujo

ForeverJameses, “Reading the Right – Volume One: The Bell Curve”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgZFGgJlAsk

The Bell Curve PDF: https://lesacreduprintemps19.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/the-bell-curve.pdf

P 37-38 “The Creation of a Cognitive Elite Within The College System.”

John Ogbu p. 307

Ogbu and Simons, “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance With Some Implications for Eductation.” https://faculty.washington.edu/rsoder/EDUC305/OgbuSimonsvoluntaryinvoluntary.pdf

“From his comparative research Ogbu has concluded that (1) no minority group does better in school because it is genetically superior than others; (2) no minority culture is better at educating its children; and (3) no minority language is better suited for learning in school (Simons et al. n.d.). He has argued that from a comparative perspective, one cannot attribute the differences in minority school performance to cultural, linguistic, or genetic differences. This is not to deny genetic differences or to deny that cultural and language differences may have an adverse or positive effect on minority school performance; but culture and language do not entirely determine the differences among minorities. Consider that some minority groups, like the Buraku outcast in Japan, do poorly in school in their country of origin but do quite well in the United States, or that Koreans do well in school in China and in the United States but do poorly in Japan. Comparative research suggests that we might discover at least a part of the explanation by closely looking at the histories and sociocultural adaptations of these minorities (Simons et al. n.d.). More specifically, to understand why minority groups differ among themselves in school performance we have to know two things: the first is their own responses to their history of incorporation into U.S. society and their subsequent treatment or mistreatment by white Americans. The second is how their responses to that history and treatment affect their perceptions of and responses to schooling.”

Erik Siegel, Scientific American “The Real Problem With Charles Murray and ‘The Bell Curve.’ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/the-real-problem-with-charles-murray-and-the-bell-curve/

““The Bell Curve” endorses prejudice by virtue of what it does not say. Nowhere does the book address why it investigates racial differences in IQ. By never spelling out a reason for reporting on these differences in the first place, the authors transmit an unspoken yet unequivocal conclusion: Race is a helpful indicator as to whether a person is likely to hold certain capabilities. Even if we assume the presented data trends are sound, the book leaves the reader on his or her own to deduce how to best put these insights to use. The net effect is to tacitly condone the prejudgment of individuals based on race.”

“Daring Research or ‘Social Science Pornography’?”

“”Why can a publisher sell it?” he asked in the proposal for “Losing Ground.” “Because a huge number of well-meaning whites fear that they are closet racists, and this book tells them they are not. It’s going to make them feel better about things they already think but do not know how to say.”…

December 17, 2019

Where Things Stand

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Couple of business updates for everyone.

First of all, TARDIS Eruditorum v5 is back in print just in time for the holidays. The Kindle and print editions are still stubbornly not connecting with one another, so here they are:

Kindle

At this point, volumes 1-5 of TARDIS Eruditorum, Last War in Albion 1, and Neoreaction a Basilisk are all back in print. I expect I’ll get v6 early next year, and v7 out in general… ooh, I had been saying January/February, but let’s call it March/April just cause November was kind of a train wreck for productivity. I have like three more essays to write, but they all involve a lot of television watching that I just haven’t found time for.

Speaking of Neoreaction a Basilisk, I’ve cut the UK Kindle price to the bare minimum for a bit in case anyone needs some cathartically funny reading about how we’re all fucked.

Finally, I wanted to highlight that Dalek Eruditorum is still only at the baseline 13 post version, with the Patreon stalled at $667. So it needs $33 to get the second swath of stories, and $83 to get the third. Perhaps more to the point, though, the Patreon is a full $133 away from me reviewing Series 12 of Doctor Who. Yes, I know that’s a very high goal. But equally, Series 11 was terrible and depressing and if I’m going to choke out another ten essays of trying to evaluate the Chibnall era then I’m going to need to be paid very well for it. That said, it’d feel weird and sad not to review Doctor Who, and so I remain hopeful that there’ll be a big surge of Patrons that will get me to that goal.

But let’s start with $33 to make Dalek Eruditorum a twenty-six week affair. To review, that will mean I cover The War Machines, Enemy of the World, Inferno, The Sea Devils, The Ark in Space, Horror of Fang Rock, The Horns of Nimon, Enlightenment, Terror of the Vervoids, Paradise Towers, Rise of the Cybermen/Age of Steel, The Bells of Saint John, and World Enough and Time/The Doctor Falls. So if that sounds good, the Patreon is right where it always is.…

December 16, 2019

Let Them Bleed Now (Precious Things)

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Precious Things (live, 1991)

Precious Things (1992)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1994)

Precious Things (live, 1996)

Precious Things (live, 1997)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1998)

Precious Things (live, 1998)

Precious Things (live at Glastonbury, 1998)

Precious Things (TV performance, 1999)

Precious Things (live, 2003)

Precious Things (TV performance, 2003)

Precious Things (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Precious Things (live, 2011)

Precious Things (2012)

Precious Things (live, 2014)

In September of 1990, Amos submitted an initial version of the album that would eventually be called Little Earthquakes. The track list was in several regards perverse, even given that Amos only had the Siegerson sessions to go on—most puzzlingly, “Mary,” and “Sweet Dreams,” both made it on while “Silent All These Years” and “Upside Down” both missed out. Atlantic rejected this version of the album, however, and so Amos went back to work.

With next to no budget left for improving the album, Amos found herself working at a home studio with her then-boyfriend Eric Rosse. They brought in a handful of session musicians including Steve Caton, Amos’s guitarist from Y Kant Tori Read, and Amos set out to write a new batch of songs. The songs from these sessions generally skew a bit heavier than the Siegerson sessions—Amos’s piano is backed by Caton’s guitar on all of them, and they make much heavier use of conventional drums. This does not mean that they were poppier per se—it’s notable that none of the album’s four videos came from these sessions—but they marked a clear effort to make the album harder and to give it a bit more of an edge.

Even among these songs, however, “Precious Things” stands out. Indeed, there are few if any collections of songs that “Precious Things” would not stand out among. It’s a chilling piece, flush with both fury and emotional vulnerability. This combination is not unprecedented in pop music, but it’s most commonly associated with the genre of breakup songs. “Precious Things” is not a breakup song, although that’s not the worst starting point for understanding what it is.

Like a breakup song, “Precious Things” is at its core an exorcism. The emotional engine of a good breakup song comes from the push and pull between the singer’s anger/contempt and the singer’s pain/sorrow. Its central paradox is that the singer still cares enough about whoever they’re disavowing to be singing an impassioned song about them. Getting over someone is manifestly not the same thing as being over them. And this is the same dynamic at the heart of “Precious Things.” Its furious plea to “let them bleed / let them wash away” is undermined before it begins by the description of these things as “precious.” The song seeks to expunge, but the nature of this is that whatever is being rejected must at the moment of rejection have its teeth in you. “Let them break their hold on me” can only be said from within their grasp.

But again, “Precious Things” is not a breakup song; its targets are bigger than that.…

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