The Kinks perform 'Lola' on Top of the Pops in 1970

“How does one describe Artemis Fowl?” Artemis Fowl, Book 1, Page 1.

Although this quote from the first series sets the tone of Artemis being a character who is loath to be understood, what with how he “delights in not talking” about how it is he perceives himself to truly be, I want to attempt to answer this rhetorical question. After all, the quote serves as a bookend for the series — both the first and final book contain it.

In answering this question, I want to not answer “how does one describe Artemis Fowl?” but rather, “what is Artemis Fowl?” — the series, that is. I think now is a good time to answer this question, what with the first cycle of the series, the Artemis Fowl saga, being complete and the second cycle, the Fowl twins saga, beginning. In short, I want to ask: what context surrounds the book series being published? What are some important themes to the series? And what gives the book series its spark?

I first have to start this video essay by admitting that I was wrong in another essay: “A look into the role of Irish mythology as inspiration for Colfer's depiction of the People: an essay”. You can find this on fanfiction.net or on archive of our own under works by mentosmorii, by the way. The synopsis I provided for the essay is as follows: “Although Colfer has stated before that he has drawn from his knowledge of Irish mythology, he has never stated specifically which myths informed his writing. As someone with a bit of a background in Irish mythology, I have made a guess at some of the sources of inspiration, explained a couple of references within the series, and analyzed a few characters as having connections to Irish history/mythology.”

A lot of the content in that essay is correct, I feel I should say. However, an area where I misstep is here: “ Eoin Colfer has been asked about the influence of Irish mythology on his writing during various interviews, and his response is usually a sort of permutation of the above answer — ‘I grew up reading Irish myths and legends, [and] I… put… a spin on them’ (Colfer). He admits that he was influenced by Irish mythology, and this admission of influence is usually enough to get interviewers to move along to the next question. I’ve looked through many of the interviews that he’s done, and I think I can say with confidence that there is not currently any interview available in which an interviewer presses him to be more specific and point to the myths and legends in question by which he was influenced. In all likelihood, I think that this is because once Colfer confirms that he did, in fact, take inspiration from Irish mythology, the interviewers think of pop culture Celtic mythology and move on”.

The assertion that I made that was incorrect is about the interviewer moving on due to a lack of visibility of Irish myths. However, you also have to look at when the first book was published, which was in 2001. During the 90s to the early 2000s, Ireland was going through something called the “Celtic tiger”, which essentially means that there was an international market that was becoming quite interested in Irish culture, leading to the development of a new, commercially successful Celticism. Cormac MacRaois (pronounced: cormick Mccreesh) estimated, at the time of writing in 1997, that there were at least thirty books dedicated to the retellings of mythological tales on the children’s shelves of Irish bookshops, alongside a burgeoning quantity of contemporary fantasy drawing upon mythological sources for its characters and themes” (Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New perspectives). Furthermore, in Mary Donohue’s unpublished 2003 MA thesis entitled “From Wexford to the arctic circle, a cultural journey”, she remarks that in a video interview, Colfer mentions that he had initially planned to publish a collection of Irish myths and legends, but that he abandoned this plan when he realized how many good collections were already in print (Donohoe, 2003, p. 24).

What I want to point out is that although the series was published at a time when there was increased interest in Irish mythology, it is interesting that Colfer deviates from the fairy tale and leans into the futuristic. What do I mean by this?

In many ways, the Artemis Fowl series, at least up until book 8, is more of a sci-fi than it is a fantasy. Which is a bold claim for me to make, I know!

However, a quote from book one in which Root is talking to Foaly as the LEP tries to plan how to get Holly back summarizes this seemingly paradoxical analysis of the series quite nicely: Science is taking the magic out of everything.

As Anna Bugajska (pronounced: ah-na boo-guy-ska) states in her essay "Human Magic", "Fairy Technology" : The Place of the Supernatural in the Age of Cyberculture, which is about the Artemis Fowl series: “Fairies deprived of natural wings use their artificial counterparts. Dwarves are practically walking machines. Invisibility is achieved by ‘shielding’. Artemis uses ‘human magic’ to heal a fairy [the sprite in Ho Chi Minh whom he gives a serum to help her alcohol dependence], but must rack his brains to escape ‘fairy technology’. The convergence point comes at the search for a Booke of Magick and at a failed Ritual performance…  In the world where fairies rely on blasters and bio-bombs to take out their enemies, is there any place for good ol’ magic? Or is it by any chance homogenous with “man-made magic”, that is technology?”.

The fact that the people seem to rely more on technology than on magic is important to the parallels that the series establishes between humanity and the fae — in many ways, the two societies are two sides of the same coin. In many ways, you could even take Root’s comment about “Science taking the magic out of everything” as the same sort of thing your boss, or teacher, or any older person, really, might say when presented with new technology that they don’t quite yet understand. It seems like their society also suffers from the same anxieties older humans have about technology progressing and leaving previous generations in the dust.

The fact that the book series seems to be more of a sci-fi than a fantasy is important for two reasons, the first one of which is discussed in Elizabeth Parsons’ essay “Fowl Play: Artemis Fowl, Sitting Ducks, and politics for children” and the second of which is discussed in Patricia Kennan’s essay “Contemplating Otherness, imagining the future” . The first perspective, Parsons’, which I do agree with, is that the book brings up parallels between the People and humanity that suggest that the fairies are just as guilty of the environmental issues and social injustice that they like to critique humans for. The second perspective, which I do not necessarily fully agree with but that I find interesting, Kennan’s perspective, is on whether or not Artemis Fowl series “feels” Irish because of this emphasis on the sci-fi over the myth.

Let’s first address Parsons’ argument. Parsons argues that there is no real, discernible difference between the two worlds that share the planet — “Technological advances drive humanity’s destruction of the earth’s surface as much as they [drive] the spread of fairy civilization underground” (Parsons). In fact, Parsons points to the enormous sum of gold at the center of the conflict in book one as evidence that the People are not as innocent of this kind of environmental destruction as they would like to think. After all, you cannot mine gold from the earth without having some kind of negative impact on the planet. Whether it’s from how you might destabilize the ground as you mine, or the pollutants you may release, or even the effect that comes with removing the gold from its natural place in the earth, you cannot escape the fact that Faeries likely also have a history of troubling environmental impacts to answer for. There is also the fact that fairy society is *extremely* developed and industrialized. Just as how the presence of gold presents the question of how the People acquired that wealth, the technology the people have presents the question of how did they develop said tech. You can’t go from a building the wheel to building a neutrino gun — there was likely an industrial revolution in which the People engaged in unclean energy practices as they developed their understanding of how to engineer. And this concern is supported by the text!

In book one, Holly is talking about two mechanical wing types that the LEP uses — the older models called the Dragonflies and the newer models called the Hummingbirds. The book says the following: “Holly unhooked a set of wings from their bracket... Dragonflies. She hated that model. Gas engine, if you believe it... Now the Hummingbird Z7, that was transport. Whisper silent, with a satellite-bounced solar battery that would fly you twice around the world. But there were budget cuts again.” (pp. 50-51).

Perhaps the People may like to argue that they are more environmentally evolved than humanity, and sure, they are, but they’re far from being as innocent in the exploitation of earth than they’d like to think — they still use gas engines, after all!

But that’s just from an environmental point of view. Socially, there is also little difference between the progress of the People and humanity. Honestly, in some aspects, the people are farther behind, what with how Holly mentions being the first woman to be hired to her position even though the book opens at the start of the 21st century. And although Holly understands that others assuming she is less capable on the basis of her gender is both illogical and prejudiced, she herself falls into similar lines of thinking in books 1 and 2. She certainly makes some unkind assumptions regarding how she thinks her coworker Lilli, an attractive woman, was hired because the recruiter fancied Lili. Which, knowing the rather old-fashioned beliefs the LEP higher-ups have regarding women, could be the case! Yet the way she specifically talks about Lili makes it clear she does not see a potential ally against mistreatment in the office — Lili is someone who, in unkind moments, Holly privately kind of sees as an acceptable target of workplace gossip. And Holly, to be fair, grows out of this mindset by the final book — she still doesn’t like Lili, but she’s matured past the point of engaging in making harmful assumptions about her coworker.

And beyond this, Holly also in book one falls into patterns of making assumptions about the various different groups of fairies in Haven. For example, she implies in her first encounter with Mulch that his rapscallion behavior and petty crimes are kind of linked to the fact he’s dwarf. And she certainly doesn’t treat him well in book 1 — she zaps him when he makes a move to pick-pocket despite the fact the situation could have been de-escalated with initial action other than violence. Again, she moves beyond this way thinking by the final book. Yet the society the society she lived in, no matter how much she values things like justice and equality, still influenced her to make judgment calls that either are solely about another person’s identity, such as her comments about Lili, or that tie someone’s behavior to their identity, such as how she links Mulch’s behavior to the fact he is a dwarf. Holly isn’t the problem — the society is.

This is why you have Mulch’s later quote that “I’d rather trust a bunch of humans not to hunt a species to extinction than trust an LEP consultant” (177). Here, the first book kind of hits you over the head with the message: both of the societies, human and fairy, have issues of inequality and environmental abuse built into them. They both suck!

Holly, I think wakes up to this fact at the end of book 4 following the fact that Sool and the council valued money and power over bringing Opal to justice for her murder of Root. After this, she has a more nuanced perspective on ideas of justice and what means to want justice. A line that sticks out to me is from book 8 when she’s thinking about what she wants for Opal. She brings up the fact that at one point, she would have wanted Opal to suffer as she had. However, what Holly wants by the 8th book is for the suffering to stop, period. She doesn’t want to seek justice by humiliating or hurting Opal, what she wants is Opal to no longer be capable of hurting others. And this doesn’t mean that Holly no longer hates Opal, because she unequivocally does. But the cycle of Opal hurting others, the LEP hurting Opal, and then Opal coming back to enact vengeance again, and again, and again, is something that Holly wants to end. She no longer wants to engage in this cycle.

To circle back to my original point, this is why the series relying on sci-fi more than the more magical elements of fairy society is important: by showing us fairies that evolved past the role they would fill in myths, which is more nature-based, Colfer is able to talk about technology in human society, both good and bad, and human society itself, both good and bad. This different depiction of fairies and a more sci-fi plot was what made the story stand when it was being marketed, but it is also interestingly a point of criticism that is invoked when talking about whether or not the story “feel” Irish.

This is the second point of criticism that I discussed earlier is in Patricia Kennan’s essay “Contemplating Otherness, imagining the future”. She doesn’t think blending sci-fi and fantasy is negative — that would be an uncharitable reading of her essay. She even states in the essay that, “the most successful writers of science fantasy, however, have been able to stretch the parameters of both kinds of minds [the fantasy and technological], a feat to be admired”.

She talks about the blending of both mythic and realistic narratives, as well as that mixture’s popularity in recent Irish children’s science fiction. This idea of hybrid forces, the fantasy and the realistic, is attractive, she suggests, because of the chaos contained in their tension in the narrative. It’s for the same reason, perhaps, that fiction containing elements like vampires, that straddle the boundary between night and day, alive and dead, animal and human, is popular, as they contain interesting and allure characteristics while also being horrifying and repulsive.

(Side note: the idea of “otherness” and the human and the magical intersecting is very interesting as an aesthetic when one considers that one of the most influential vampire novels, Dracula, was written by an Irish author and that many of the aesthetics associated with Dracula also fit neatly with Artemis — this further underlines that he straddles the line between good and bad, human and magical, technology and fantasy in the way he seems to be a hybrid of gothic literature aesthetics dressed up in a modern, sci-fi package. I’m gonna end my sidenote here).

However, Kennan points to the plot and setting of the story as perhaps being why the series does feel very grounded in its Irish roots. The essay quotes Celia Keenan, saying: “all sense of the national and local have been eradicated [from the series]. Speech rhythms are entirely mid-Atlantic. No Hiberno-English or Wexford uses are evident. Landscape has become virtual”.

In some ways, I can see her point. Artemis Fowl is a very James Bond-type series in that it tries to invent settings rather than borrowing from existing reference points to place itself. A good example of this would be the fact that Fowl manor and Artemis’ school, Saint Bartleby’s, never are placed concretely within specific locations in Ireland. There might be a sense that Saint Bartleby’s is near Wexford or that the manor is near Dublin, but what proximity might mean (such as showing neighbors, classmates, and descriptions of the setting) is often avoided: the main characters and settings that are explored are often more international, such as Minerva and Spiro being French and American respectively, and the series often taking place in Haven or locations related to it. However, I think that there are at least some references that make the book still feel grounded as being Irish —  I go into this in my other essay, but I can recap. There are specific references to Irish mythology and history, even if things like modern Irish history, side characters beyond the Butlers and Fowls that are Irish, and slang or dialect specific to different parts of Ireland aren’t referenced frequently.

So to summarize this point, the series does play with the trappings of a James Bond series in the sense that the setting bounces around enough that perhaps Ireland isn’t at the center always, and I think that this is a function of how Colfer writes sci-fi instead of something that destabilizes the sense of the where and when of the series. For instance, a big example of pop culture that Colfer references is the Matrix, albeit in a sneaky way. Celia Keenan (who is also quoted Kennon’s essay) wrote the article “Who’s afraid of the bad little Fowl?” which serves as a book review and a look into whether or not one could call the series ‘art’. When talking about references the book makes to pop culture, she writes: “It is possible that the film which has most influenced the ‘‘Fowl’’ books is The Matrix (1999). It depicts two worlds, the computer-controlled world of the matrix itself in which humans function as duped slaves, and the world of human resistance fighters who, like Colfer’s fairies, have been forced to create an alternative home called Zion, in the bowels of the earth. The term ‘‘recon unit’’, echoed in Colfer’s LEPrecon, figures in the Matrix. Colfer actually parodies quotations from The Matrix on a few occasions. For example, in The Matrix one of the characters says to the hero, ‘‘Buckle your seat belt, Dorothy, because Kansas is going ‘bye bye’’’; likewise, Root says to Artemis, ‘‘Hate to tell you this, Dorothy, but you ain’t in Kansas anymore’, in Artemis Fowl: the Arctic Incident (p. 63). Another Matrix quip—‘‘never send a human to do a machine’s job’’ (Wachowski, 1999), is parodied by Mulch: ‘‘Tell Foaly not to send a Mud Man to do a fairy’s job’’. In this instance, the narrator emphasizes the cinematic origins of the quotation: ‘‘‘Oh dear,’ thought Artemis, rubbing his brow, ‘Hollywood had a lot to answer for’’’(Colfer, 2002, p. 208).”

The creators of the Matrix, the Wachowski sisters, were pretty influenced by a philosopher named Jean Baudrillard (pronounced: Bow-dree-ard), even if Baudrillard didn’t particularly think their work was grounded in his theory. Baudrillard was undeniably a smart man, but he was also kind of a prick. Make of that what you will. But for those who aren’t familiar with his work or the Matrix itself, these works deal with themes of technology, reality, and the future of our society. To go back to Artemis Fowl, I think the series engages with these themes through both the allusion to Matrix and through the themes of the series itself. Although the series of Artemis Fowl many not engage specifically with many of Baudrillard’s theories, it does engage with similar philosophical concepts about sci-fi and the self.

One particular example of this is how the series (maybe unintentionally) engages with Gilbert Ryle, who was a British philosopher, and his concept of ‘mind-body-dualism’; Ryle came up with the idea of human existence being the tale of ‘a ghost within a machine’, or our sense of self-existing in a separate, physical shell. To simplify, this essentially points out the fact that what we view as being our “us”, our personalities, our inner thoughts, our perception of ourselves, is often separate from our bodies — when I think of who “I” am, I think of my “mind” rather than “body”, and this is exactly what the dualism Ryle pointed out gets at.  Often, sci-fi seeks to explore what if this barrier dissolved — such as what if with the evolution of the mind, there was also an evolution of the body, and whether this could be achieved through things like AI, cyborgs, and so on. To go back to Anna Bugajska’s work, she wrote an essay entitled “Artemis Fowl: Posthumanism for teens” that tackles this within the series.

Which admittedly is a bit of a mouthful of a title! It sounds complicated — and it is, it definitely is.  

But it is interesting. To go back to the idea of transformation and Artemis Fowl, the series deals with this theme quite a bit. To quote Bugajska: “What naturally could develop into a coming-of-age cycle, swerves into the direction of a transformation, calling into question human nature and individual identity in the age of the morphological freedom, mind uploads, bioengineering, and hybronauts…[the series explores ideas of transformation as a result of a desire to seek previously unaccessible power, but it also explores the idea in the context of the mind and body becoming one in how an impact one must result in an impact of the other].

A prominent example of those who went too far in their quest for [transformative] perfection are Briar Cudgeon, an LEP officer, and Opal Koboi, a genius pixie inventor. Cudgeon, embittered by professional conflict, sought the cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs. As a result, “the tranquilizer had reacted badly with some banned mind- accelerating substances the former acting-commander had been experimenting with. Cudgeon was left with a forehead like melted tar... Ugly and demoted, not a great combination” (Colfer 2003a: 77). [In this case, his desire for power causes his downfall, such as how he tried to enhance his abilities past his limit with the mind-accelerating drug that ended up reacting with the tranquilizer. However, this is also an example of the barrier between the body and the mind dissolving, as Cudgeon’s internal ‘ugliness’, such as his hunger for power, deceitfulness, and disregard for others’, is reflected in his physical form through his overindulgence in substances he uses to try to get around his natural limits.]

In the case of Opal Koboi, we can observe a conscious attempt to transform from one being to another. She has her pointy ears operated upon to give them human shape. What is more, she implants in her brain a human pituitary gland to provoke the secretion of the growth hormone (Colfer 2005: 173–174). She even goes as far as extracting substances from various animals to enhance her magic (Colfer 2011a: 263, 270). All these attempts in the end cost her her sanity (Colfer 2012: 36) and her magic powers, which is especially well visible in the fourth book of the cycle, Opal Deception (Colfer 2005: 329).

On the other hand, the changes in identity must necessarily be reflected in the alterations of at least some parts of the body. Thus, Artemis’s father, a former criminal boss, loses his leg [as he undergoes a sort of transformation after the deal Artemis holds in order to rescue his father from a hostage situation. Beforehand, he might have been a cruel, distant father, but now he has changed. He has become a new man, and in doing so, his body has been altered as well in the loss of a leg and the gaining of a prosthesis] (Colfer 2003b: 80–81). Artemis himself, as he grows from a calculating rationalist to a globally-responsible, empathic man, earns a few body modifications. And although he does not seek them, he does not attempt to get rid of them, instinctively hoarding as much of the “fairness” as he can get. For instance, in The Lost Colony, where Artemis and his friend Holly Short of the LEP travel through a time-tunnel, first his fingers are switched, then he swaps an eye with Holly, and finally he steals some of the fairy magic, which grants him limited healing and regeneration powers. He also gains three years during the travel: in his own time he has to pose as a seventeen-year-old (Colfer 2007: 371)”.

In essence, you have both people seeking to perfect the body in order to match the goals of mind, such as Opal trying to steal new types of magic, and then you have Artemis switching eyes with Holly, representing a more benign example of the body changing to match the mind, as switching eyes represents that he has literally switched perspectives and can see things through her eyes as a result of their friendship. And in the end of the series, you also have Artemis being reborn into a clone — he has changed so much from his self at the beginning of the series, it is like his past self is dead, and his moral rebirth is reflected literally in him being given a new body free of the constraints of the mistakes he made before his passing, such as kidnapping Holly or endangering Butler on multiple occasions.

This I suppose covers most of the grounds that I wanted to in this essay. I talked about the context of the book series being published, the themes, the characters, and the philosophical questions posed by the text.

I don’t know if answered my original question of “what is Artemis Fowl?” — I think I’ll always have something to say about the series. But this puts words to a lot of thoughts I’ve had, and it’s nice to at least have it all there, I suppose. Thanks for listening, and if you have questions, leave me a comment here on on the ao3 version of the essay [x]-- or send me an ask!

“How does one describe Artemis Fowl?” Artemis Fowl, Book 1, Page 1.

Although this quote from the first series sets the tone of Artemis being a character who is loath to be understood, what with how he “delights in not talking” about how it is he perceives himself to truly be, I want to attempt to answer this rhetorical question. After all, the quote serves as a bookend for the series — both the first and final book contain it.

In answering this question, I want to not answer “how does one describe Artemis Fowl?” but rather, “what is Artemis Fowl?” — the series, that is. I think now is a good time to answer this question, what with the first cycle of the series, the Artemis Fowl saga, being complete and the second cycle, the Fowl twins saga, beginning. In short, I want to ask: what context surrounds the book series being published? What are some important themes to the series? And what gives the book series its spark?

I first have to start this video essay by admitting that I was wrong in another essay: “A look into the role of Irish mythology as inspiration for Colfer's depiction of the People: an essay”. You can find this on fanfiction.net or on archive of our own under works by mentosmorii, by the way. The synopsis I provided for the essay is as follows: “Although Colfer has stated before that he has drawn from his knowledge of Irish mythology, he has never stated specifically which myths informed his writing. As someone with a bit of a background in Irish mythology, I have made a guess at some of the sources of inspiration, explained a couple of references within the series, and analyzed a few characters as having connections to Irish history/mythology.”

A lot of the content in that essay is correct, I feel I should say. However, an area where I misstep is here: “ Eoin Colfer has been asked about the influence of Irish mythology on his writing during various interviews, and his response is usually a sort of permutation of the above answer — ‘I grew up reading Irish myths and legends, [and] I… put… a spin on them’” (Colfer). He admits that he was influenced by Irish mythology, and this admission of influence is usually enough to get interviewers to move along to the next question. I’ve looked through many of the interviews that he’s done, and I think I can say with confidence that there is not currently any interview available in which an interviewer presses him to be more specific and point to the myths and legends in question by which he was influenced. In all likelihood, I think that this is because once Colfer confirms that he did, in fact, take inspiration from Irish mythology, the interviewers think of pop culture Celtic mythology and move on”.

The assertion that I made that was incorrect is about the interviewer moving on due to a lack of visibility of Irish myths. However, you also have to look at when the first book was published, which was in 2001. During the 90s to the early 2000s, Ireland was going through something called the “Celtic tiger”, which essentially means that there was an international market that was becoming quite interested in Irish culture, leading to the development of a new, commercially successful Celticism. Cormac MacRaois (pronounced: Cormick Mccreesh) estimated, at the time of writing in 1997, that there were at least thirty books dedicated to the retellings of mythological tales on the children’s shelves of Irish bookshops, alongside a burgeoning quantity of contemporary fantasy drawing upon mythological sources for its characters and themes” (Irish Children’s Literature and Culture: New perspectives). 

Furthermore, in Mary Donohue’s unpublished 2003 MA thesis entitled “From Wexford to the arctic circle, a cultural journey”, she remarks that in a video interview, Colfer mentions that he had initially planned to publish a collection of Irish myths and legends, but that he abandoned this plan when he realized how many good collections were already in print (Donohoe, 2003, p. 24).

What I want to point out is that although the series was published at a time when there was increased interest in Irish mythology, it is interesting that Colfer deviates from the fairy tale and leans into the futuristic. What do I mean by this?

In many ways, the Artemis Fowl series, at least up until book 8, is more of a sci-fi than it is a fantasy. Which is a bold claim for me to make, I know!

A quote from book one in which Root is talking to Foaly as the LEP tries to plan how to get Holly back summarizes this analysis of the series quite nicely: “Science is taking the magic out of everything”.

As Anna Bugajska (pronounced: ah-na boo-guy-ska) states in her essay "Human Magic", "Fairy Technology": The Place of the Supernatural in the Age of Cyberculture: “Fairies deprived of natural wings use their artificial counterparts. Dwarves are practically walking machines. Invisibility is achieved by ‘shielding’. Artemis uses ‘human magic’ to heal a fairy [the sprite in Ho Chi Minh whom he gives a serum to help her alcohol dependence], but must rack his brains to escape ‘fairy technology’. The convergence point comes at the search for a Booke of Magick and at a failed Ritual performance…  In the world where fairies rely on blasters and bio-bombs to take out their enemies, is there any place for good ol’ magic? Or is it by any chance homogenous with “man-made magic”, that is technology?”.

The fact that the book series seems to be more of a sci-fi than a fantasy is important for two reasons, the first reason of which is discussed in Elizabeth Parsons’ essay “Fowl Play: Artemis Fowl, Sitting Ducks, and politics for children” and the second of which is discussed by Anna Bugajska. The first perspective, Parsons’, is that the book brings up parallels between the People and humanity that suggest that the fairies are just as guilty of the environmental issues and social injustice that they like to critique humans for. The second perspective is that the emphasis on the blending of science and magic in the narrative helps explore the themes of moral evolution within the series.

Let’s first address Parsons’ argument. Parsons argues that there is no discernible difference between the two worlds that share the planet — “Technological advances drive humanity’s destruction of the earth’s surface as much as they [drive] the spread of fairy civilization underground” (Parsons). In fact, Parsons points to the enormous sum of gold at the center of the conflict in book one as evidence that the People are not as innocent of this kind of environmental destruction as they would like to think. After all, you cannot mine gold from the earth without having some kind of negative impact on the planet. Whether it’s from how you might destabilize the ground as you mine, or the pollutants you may release, or even the effect that comes with removing the gold from its natural place in the earth, you cannot escape the fact that Faeries likely also have a history of troubling environmental impacts to answer for. There is also the fact that fairy society is *extremely* industrialized. Just as how the presence of gold presents the question of how the People acquired that wealth, the technology the people have presents the question of how did they develop said tech. You can’t go from a building the wheel to building a neutrino gun — there was likely an industrial revolution in which the People engaged in unclean energy practices as they developed their understanding of how to engineer. And this concern is supported by the text!

In book one, Holly is talking about two mechanical wing types that the LEP uses — the older models called the Dragonflies and the newer models called the Hummingbirds. The book says the following: “Holly unhooked a set of wings from their bracket... Dragonflies. She hated that model. Gas engine, if you believe it... Now the Hummingbird Z7, that was transport. Whisper silent, with a satellite-bounced solar battery that would fly you twice around the world. But there were budget cuts again.” (pp. 50-51).

Perhaps the People may like to argue that they are more environmentally evolved than humanity, and sure, they are, but they’re far from being as innocent in the exploitation of earth than they’d like to think — they still use gas engines, after all!

But that’s just from an environmental point of view. Socially, there is also little difference between the progress of the People and humanity. Honestly, in some aspects, the people are farther behind, what with how Holly mentions being the first woman to be hired to her position even though the book opens at the start of the 21st century. And although Holly understands that others assuming she is less capable on the basis of her gender is both illogical and prejudiced, she herself falls into similar lines of thinking in books 1 and 2. She certainly makes some unkind assumptions regarding how she thinks her coworker Lili, an attractive woman, was hired because the recruiter fancied Lili. Which, knowing the rather old-fashioned beliefs the LEP higher-ups have regarding women, could be the case! Yet the way she specifically talks about Lili makes it clear she does not see a potential ally against mistreatment in the office — Lili is someone who, in unkind moments, Holly privately sort of sees as an acceptable target of workplace gossip. And Holly, to be fair, grows out of this mindset by the final book — she still doesn’t like Lili, but she’s matured past the point of engaging in making harmful assumptions about her coworker.

And beyond this, Holly also in book one falls into patterns of making assumptions about the various different groups of fairies in Haven. For example, she implies in her first encounter with Mulch that his rapscallion behavior and petty crimes are kind of linked to the fact he’s dwarf. And she certainly doesn’t treat him well in book 1 — she zaps him when he makes a move to pick-pocket despite the fact the situation could have been de-escalated with initial action other than violence. Again, she moves beyond this way thinking by the final book. Yet the society she lived in, no matter how much she values things like justice and equality, still influenced her to make judgment calls that either are solely about another person’s identity, such as her comments about Lili, or that tie someone’s behavior to their identity, such as how she links Mulch’s behavior to the fact he is a dwarf. Holly isn’t the problem — the society is.

This is why you have Mulch’s later quote that “I’d rather trust a bunch of humans not to hunt a species to extinction than trust an LEP consultant” (177). Here, the first book kind of hits you over the head with the message: both of the societies, human and fairy, have issues of inequality and environmental abuse built into them.

Holly, I think wakes up to this fact at the end of book 4 following the fact that Sool and the council valued money and power over bringing Opal to justice for her murder of Root. After this, she has a more nuanced perspective on ideas of justice and what means to want justice. A line that sticks out to me is from book 8 when she’s thinking about what she wants for Opal. She brings up the fact that at one point, she would have wanted Opal to suffer as she had. However, what Holly wants by the 8th book is for the suffering to stop, period. She doesn’t want to seek justice by humiliating or hurting Opal, what she wants is Opal to no longer be capable of hurting others. And this doesn’t mean that Holly no longer hates Opal, because she unequivocally does. But the cycle of Opal hurting others, the LEP hurting Opal, and then Opal coming back to enact vengeance again, and again, and again, is something that Holly wants to end. She no longer wants to engage in this cycle.

To circle back to my original point, this is why the series relying on sci-fi more than the more magical elements of fairy society is important: by showing us fairies that evolved past the role they would fill in myths, which is more nature-based, Colfer is able to talk about technology in human society, both good and bad, and human society itself, both good and bad.

The second point, that the series uses technology and sci-fi to explore philosophical topics, is also part of the appeal to the series. 

One particular example that comes to mind is how the series (maybe unintentionally) engages with Gilbert Ryle, who was a British philosopher, and his concept of ‘mind-body-dualism’; Ryle wrote on the idea of human existence being the tale of ‘a ghost within a machine’, or our sense of self-existing in a separate, physical shell. To simplify, this essentially points out the fact that what we view as being our “us”, our personalities, our inner thoughts, our perception of ourselves, is often separate from our bodies — such as how when I think of who “I” am, I think of my “mind” rather than “body”. Often, sci-fi seeks to explore what if this barrier dissolved — such as what if with the evolution of the mind, there was also an evolution of the body, and whether this could be achieved through things like AI, cyborgs, and so on. To go back to Anna Bugajska’s work, she wrote an essay entitled “Artemis Fowl: Posthumanism for teens” that tackles this within the series.

To go back to the idea of transformation and Artemis Fowl, the series deals with this theme quite a bit. To quote Bugajska: “What naturally could develop into a coming-of-age cycle, swerves into the direction of a transformation, calling into question human nature and individual identity in the age of the morphological freedom, mind uploads, bioengineering, and hybronauts…[the series explores ideas of transformation as a result of a desire to seek previously unaccessible power, but it also explores the idea in the context of the mind and body becoming one in how an impact one must result in an impact of the other].

“A prominent example of those who went too far in their quest for [transformative] perfection are Briar Cudgeon, an LEP officer, and Opal Koboi, a genius pixie inventor. Cudgeon, embittered by professional conflict, sought the cognitive enhancement through the use of drugs. As a result, “the tranquilizer had reacted badly with some banned mind- accelerating substances the former acting-commander had been experimenting with. Cudgeon was left with a forehead like melted tar... Ugly and demoted, not a great combination” (Colfer 2003a: 77). [In this case, his desire for power causes his downfall, such as how he tried to enhance his abilities past his limit with the mind-accelerating drug that ended up reacting with the tranquilizer. However, this is also an example of the barrier between the body and the mind dissolving, as Cudgeon’s internal ‘ugliness’, such as his hunger for power, deceitfulness, and disregard for others’, is reflected in his physical form through his overindulgence in substances he uses to try to get around his natural limits.]

“In the case of Opal Koboi, we can observe a conscious attempt to transform from one being to another. She has her pointy ears operated upon to give them human shape. What is more, she implants in her brain a human pituitary gland to provoke the secretion of the growth hormone (Colfer 2005: 173–174). She even goes as far as extracting substances from various animals to enhance her magic (Colfer 2011a: 263, 270). All these attempts in the end cost her her sanity (Colfer 2012: 36) and her magic powers, which is especially well visible in the fourth book of the cycle, the Opal Deception (Colfer 2005: 329).

“On the other hand, the changes in identity must necessarily be reflected in the alterations of at least some parts of the body... “Artemis himself, as he grows from a calculating rationalist to a globally-responsible, empathic man, earns a few body modifications. And although he does not seek them, he does not attempt to get rid of them, instinctively hoarding as much of the “fairness” as he can get. For instance, in The Lost Colony, where Artemis and his friend Holly Short of the LEP travel through a time-tunnel, first his fingers are switched, then he swaps an eye with Holly, and finally he steals some of the fairy magic, which grants him limited healing and regeneration powers. He also gains three years during the travel: in his own time he has to pose as a seventeen-year-old (Colfer 2007: 371)” (Bugajska).

In essence, you have both people seeking to perfect the body in order to match the goals of mind, such as Opal trying to steal new types of magic or Cudgeon using mind accelerating drugs, and then you have Artemis switching eyes with Holly, representing a more benign example of the body changing to match the mind, as switching eyes represents that he has literally switched perspectives and can see things through her eyes as a result of their friendship. And in the end of the series, you also have Artemis being reborn into a clone — he has changed so much from his self at the beginning of the series, it is like his past self is dead, and his moral rebirth is reflected literally in him being given a new body free of the constraints of the mistakes he made before his passing, such as kidnapping Holly or endangering Butler on multiple occasions.

I don’t know if answered my original question of “what is Artemis Fowl?” — I think I’ll always have something to say about the series. But this puts words to a lot of thoughts I’ve had, and it’s nice to at least have it all there, I suppose. Thanks for listening, and if you have questions, leave me a comment or send me an ask!

How you can Determine the Valuation on Making a New House

This can function as aid through providing some tips and methods for estimating the cost of building a brand new home. Just as one expert residential estimator there are numerous points to consider before you begin estimating. Construction estimating can be tough and yes it does demand a higher level of accuracy and detail. It also requires good math skills plus a little geometry knowledge. It needs the opportunity to read and understand construction drawings and details and how they're applied. Basic construction knowledge helps and understanding the area building codes. You might want to sign up for a construction estimating course on the local college or technical school. An alternative would be to purchase an estimating manual from the local bookstore or head to estimating.org that provides online courses and has a bookstore. One of the rules i learned along the way will be the saying, "measure twice cut once." Whenever I really do a takeoff or perhaps estimate I usually follow this rule so that you can help minimize mistakes. What you will really should put an estimate together? You need a notepad, a calculator, an architectural scale, plus an engineering scale. These are the basic tools you'll want to put a quotation together. Architectural & Structural Drawings Now you you will need to open the plans and start to check them. The best action to take is look them over and obtain an understanding of the fundamental building concept. You ought to get informed about the data that is contained on every sheet. Most construction projects possess a set of architectural drawings along with a pair of structural drawings. Let me explain the real difference forwards and backwards. It is vital that the plans will be to scale and also have all the details and wall sections had to properly estimate from. What is typically part of a complete list of architectural plans? The drawings at the very least need to support the following sheets: a title/cover sheet, a web site plan, a floor plan, a basis plan, four elevations, a roof covering plan, an electrical plan, a sheet which has a typical wall section, a sheet using the window and door schedules, along with a sheet using the necessary building and architectural details. The structural drawings are drawn by a structural engineer, not the architect, unless the architectural firm comes with an in-house engineer. Any interior shear wall or bearing wall is detailed on these drawings. The engineer calculates every one of the uplift and bearing loads of the rooftop trusses on all the exterior and interior. After doing the calculations they decide which walls are shear or bearing or both and what is necessary to properly support those uplift and or bearing loads. The engineer will put a structural note on any wall that's bearing or shear. The note will indicate the sheet number and detail number illustrating how that wall should be built. A large quanity bearing wall as an example may thickened concrete footer with two items of steel along with the wall above it will need to be framed beyond southern yellow pine versus spruce with special metal hardware. These needs to be highlighted on the plan in order that they are not overlooked. Sometimes the hardware called out by the engineer is often a special order which enable it to take many weeks to get. When you hold back until the framing package needs to ordered and you will find a two or three shear walls with special order hardware it could possibly delay the building. You have to make enough copies of the architectural and structural plans for multiple subcontractors and suppliers bidding the position. To save you cash, ask your architect and engineer to transform here is your chance files to some Document. This may save time also and earn it convenient since email them to as much subcontractors and vendors as you desire. Specifications A list of product specifications have to be provided so that all the subcontractor and vendors are bidding apples to apples. This can be a list detailing every one of the products and finishes you desire with your brand new home. This doesn't make sense to transmit the plans over to bid without a group of specifications. Without the, the bids you will get won't be apples to apples. Then you will have to have every one of them rebid the job. It wastes considerable time and produces plenty of unnecessary work with the subcontractors. Remember them do not require practice bidding and some of these may well not submit an offer with no list of specifications included. Therefore, sets from paint colors towards the floor finishes have to be selected. They should be on the plan or with a separate document. Doing the Takeoffs It is too technical to put in a written guide the way to quantify the concrete, masonry, lumber, and shingles simply to name a few. For instance let's assume you should quantify the masonry block on one story block home. You should state what sort of wall is assembled which include the opportunity to visualize and understand construction methods. In the event the exterior walls have multiple heights, a consistent block (8x8x16) must be added as well as a lintel block should be deducted in every location the place that the plate heights change. If a number of the walls are on a 45 degree angle you'll need to be capable of know whether to estimate an angle block or butterfly block. The entranceway and window openings need to have a certain quantity of standard blocks deducted including a half block another course on each side of each opening. You might have an excessive amount of one size block and only inadequate or some units not included whatsoever. These inaccuracies will screw up your budget and price you money and time. This ability and knowledge can't are derived from the sunday paper but through face to face experience joined with many years of estimating experience. If you opt to quantify the types of materials yourself It is advisable to make reference to Walker's Building Estimator's Reference Book, frankrwalker.com that has instructions on how to estimate the amount of concrete, masonry, lumber, drywall, etc. It really is considered the bible for construction estimators and it's also among required books included in the study guide for most state contractor's exam. Just keep in your mind these reference books would not have guidelines as well as real world experience as explained above.

You can use the help of your subcontractors bidding the task or your suppliers. You could possibly pay more for his or her services or products you can also hire us. Either way you are purchasing someone to review the plans and quantify prefer to build the project. When you have your lumber yard quantify the information remember he or she is attempting to win the work so he or she give you a takeoff which is too tight. This doesn't assist you to if you should keep reordering more lumber. The well-known solution to that is to possess your framer build the lumber list in your case. Well it doesn't work either as they will over order so he doesn't uses up material and possess to produce additional trips to finish. They would like to finish as soon as possible so that it will get inspected and they also could get paid. The bottom line is neither will work to your advantage. I recommend you do not try to quantify the type of material yourself. I've outlined valid main reasons why. It is extremely technical and requirements someone with many years of estimating experience joined with face to face field experience. Soliciting Bids This portion of preparing a quote is possible by most anyone. It is advisable to speak to your local builder's association to have subcontractor referrals or use Angie's List, angieslist.com which prescreens contractors at the same time You might have heard the term RFQ - Request for Quote. You would like to solicit a minimum of contractors. Most people will say three bids, so why do I propose five bids? Let's say you contact five contractors and five contractors bid the work. You have to think you will are the high bid then one could be the low bid. So those needs to be set sideways because odds are the lower bid is probably missing something and also the high bid is priced way too high. The remaining three bids should be reviewed thoroughly to successfully compare apples to apples. If you contact all of the subcontractors that you might want to bid any project make sure you give them a proposal deadline day. This way there is no need to chase them. Allow them to have a fair timeframe to examine the plans and specifications, typically one or two weeks. Analyzing the Bids First organize your entire bids by trade, for example putting all your electrical bids together. A three ring binder with dividers and tabbed with every category is a good strategy to organize all the bids. Once you get the bids you should read them carefully and review them from the plans and specifications. They ought to contain the project information and also the date. They should be detailed and itemized. Your cabinet bid shouldn't say "cabinets". Instead it ought to list and quantify each of the cabinets by finish, style, size, and site, example 15 lnft of 42" oak raised panel kitchen cupboards, 1/ea 60" melamine master bath cabinet, 1/ea 36" melamine hall bath cabinet, etc. If it will not add the countertops it must claim that so there isn't misrepresentation. Each time a proposal must be revised, make certain it states the revision date or states "revised". That way once you compile the bids so you have to refer back to them you may be exploring the latest one. The proposals must also indicate workmanship and warranty. All this is essential, specifically contractor won't perform and mediation or worse litigation is required. The best way to Negotiate the very best Price Once you determine a few competitive bids hard part is negotiating with all the contractors. You need to believe that all of the quotes will likely be inflated together with the understanding you'll negotiate less. Therefore, you ought to get them down as little as you are able to to the real number. I ask my subcontractors and vendors if the bid is negotiable. Remember it never hurts to inquire about, the worse they are able to say is no. Of course, if they say yes, however question them what's the maximum they're able to cut their bid. They normally respond with, "how much must i suffice to obtain the job" and again I put it back on them by saying, "the maximum it is possible to cut your price". Never name an amount first! You must curently have a low cost of what within your budget to pay on every item. That knows whether would be ready to take action for less than that. After they lower their bids and you also determine the low bidder you have to compare warranty, workmanship, and references. Costs are important, in case they are unable to finish the work the price does not mean anything. You need to need to check both project references and credit references. The end result is you desire the most effective contractor for that smallest amount of money. Preparing a quotation Once you have awarded the position to every subcontractor you will want to prepare a bid. I recommend using Microsoft Excel to organize your estimate. Oahu is the easiest and mostly traditionally used spreadsheet application, specially in construction. It helps organize your estimate. Use a separate worksheet for each and every trade inside Excel workbook. You'll be able to enter all of the material lists and bid amounts you obtain. You can track the work to make sure you are saved to budget. It is possible to email any local suppliers your material lists to enable them to enter their unit prices and they can email it back. One of several sheets has to be the estimate summary containing the total cost for every phase or trade. It ought to incorperate your preconstruction costs and direct construction costs. It must possess the estimate total at the bottom. You'll find endless possibilities that you can do with Excel as well as the degree of detail is about you. We've available for sale blank estimates which might be in Excel. These are templates that individuals use which will help you calculate a number of the material quantities and may also be employed to prepare your estimate. They contain prebuilt formulas for calculating concrete, steel, masonry, and lumber. All you need to do is enter counts and lengths where indicated along with the quantities are calculated in your case. Contact us to deliver which you sample template. Conclusion I am hoping this has provided you are going to some good information about how to arrange a bid if you're creating a home. Were available to answer inquiries you could have. We can enable you to come up with a quote for just about any sort of construction project, big or small, commercial or residential. Total Takeoffs can be a professional independent cost consulting firm specializing in building and construction cost estimating. We're experts providing all types of construction estimates and material takeoffs to building professionals. Our network of certified estimators have experience providing estimates on residential, commercial, and civil construction projects. We offer computer consulting services to contractors who are required to purchase an estimating program and need technical support. Additionally we post on our website the most recent building material costs. We're members of AACE and ASPE. We have been a registered expert witness for contractors involved with litigation. Our network of estimators are proficient using many construction estimating programs. We turnaround most takeoffs within 24-36 hours by having an accuracy rate which comes within 1-3% of actual cost. Contractors who're backlogged, understaffed, and therefore are downsizing on account of the existing slump can look to us for almost any sort of construction estimating. Contractors bidding one project or multiple projects can contract with us, we welcome the ability. You can expect volume reductions for multiple estimates and takeoffs. To get more information about cost of building a 2 bedroom flat in nigeria explore this useful webpage.

Evil in the Mirror: John Carpenter’s Revealing ‘Prince of Darkness’ by Joshua Rothkopf

[Last year, Musings paid homage to Produced and Abandoned: The Best Films You’ve Never Seen, a review anthology from the National Society of Film Critics that championed studio orphans from the ‘70s and ‘80s. In the days before the Internet, young cinephiles like myself relied on reference books and anthologies to lead us to films we might not have discovered otherwise. Released in 1990, Produced and Abandoned was a foundational piece of work, introducing me to such wonders as Cutter’s Way, Lost in America, High Tide, Choose Me, Housekeeping, and Fat City. (You can find the full list of entries here.) Our first round of Produced and Abandoned essays included Angelica Jade Bastién on By the Sea, Mike D’Angelo on The Counselor, Judy Berman on Velvet Goldmine, and Keith Phipps on O.C. and Stiggs. Over the next four weeks, Musings will continue with another round of essays about tarnished gems, in the hope they’ll get a second look. Or, more likely, a first. —Scott Tobias, editor.]

It’s generally accepted that John Carpenter wasn’t a personal filmmaker—not personal in the way that Martin Scorsese, only five years his senior and Italianamerican from the start, was. Carpenter grew up movie-crazy in the ’50s and ’60s. He wanted to make Westerns exactly at the moment when that became an unrealistic career goal. His heroes were Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles and, above all, Howard Hawks. It’s been nourishing to listen to Amy Nicholson’s wonderful eight-part podcast Halloween Unmasked, still in progress, and to hear Carpenter—usually oblique in interviews—open up about his boyhood in the Jim Crow–era South. He mentions visiting an insane asylum during a college psych trip and locking eyes with a prisoner who spooked him. That may be the basis for killer Michael Myers but, by and large, this was a guy who wrote what he dreamed up, not what he knew.

That’s not to suggest Carpenter didn’t develop his own signature style. When he arrived in Los Angeles in 1968 to attend film school at USC, he reinvented himself, transforming from a Max Fischer–like creative wunderkind (he was a rock guitarist and high-school class president) into a laconic, bell-bottomed cowboy who listened more than he spoke. He was too cool for nerdy Dan O’Bannon, who worked with him on Dark Star. He was too cool for Hollywood itself, even after he’d succeeded there, rarely mingling socially and turning down projects like Top Gun and Fatal Attraction.

But the cool act was a bit of smokescreen. I once asked Carpenter about it, and he owned up to a private sense of pain in regard to his work. “I take every failure hard,” he told me in 2008, singling out the audience’s abandonment of The Thing, a remake of his favorite film (one that actually improves on its source). “The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie's director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me.”

Carpenter would rebound from that 1982 commercial disaster—as well the indignity of getting sacked from Firestarter—by playing the game even better. He directed Jeff Bridges to a Best Actor nomination on Starman (that’s as rare as a unicorn for a sci-fi performance) and, just as things were turning golden, blew all his capital again on 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, which was rushed and subsequently buried in the massive shadow of Aliens. “You try to make a studio picture your own, but in the end, it’s their film,” Carpenter said in our interview, the Kentucky rascal turned bitter. “And they’re going to get what they want. After that experience, I had to stop playing for the studios for a while and go independent again.”

This is the pivotal moment in Carpenter’s career, the one that fascinates me the most. It should fascinate more people, given what the filmmaker did. Divorced and with a two-year-old son, Carpenter is, at that point, 38 years old. He’s already feeling like a Hollywood burnout, with a decade of ups and downs to prove it. The solution was a pay cut, a big one: Prince of Darkness, financed through “supermensch” Shep Gordon and Alive Films and released in 1987, would be made for a grand total of $3 million, the first title in a multi-picture deal that guaranteed Carpenter complete creative control.

Scrappy but never chintzy, Prince of Darkness is the most lovable of movies. On the surface, it has all the cool minimalism a JC fan could ask for: elegant anamorphic compositions (Gary Kibbe’s muscular cinematography adds millions more in production value), a seesawing synth score, a one-location “siege” structure akin to the director’s Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing. The movie also has Alice Cooper killing a grad student with a bicycle. It has a swirling canister of green Satanic goo in a church basement.

Critics, by and large, were unkind. In a representative review from the New York Times, Vincent Canby called it “surprisingly cheesy,” singling out first-time screenwriter Martin Quatermass for particular scorn (he “overloads the dialogue with scientific references and is stingy with the surprises”), not realizing that this was a pseudonym for Carpenter himself. Would it have mattered? Released days before Halloween, Prince got clobbered by the gig Carpenter turned down, Fatal Attraction, still surging in its sixth weekend.

But below the surface—and still a matter for wider appreciation—is the film that Carpenter dug himself out of his psychic hellhole to make: his most personal horror movie, starring a version of himself. Prince of Darkness is about watching and waiting. In a way, it’s a romantic view of the auteur’s own time at school. It’s a movie about the evil that stares out of the mirror (i.e., yourself). Like all of his films, it arrived under the possessive title John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. In my mind, that apostrophe is actually a contraction: John Carpenter Is Prince of Darkness. And Prince of Darkness is him.

First, let’s understand what $3 million means in 1987. To compare it to some other movies of the same period, Blue Velvet’s budget is twice as large. Hannah and Her Sisters, largely shot in Mia Farrow’s apartment, was funded at $6.4 million. When Scorsese decided to go indie and make his audacious The Last Temptation of Christ, he had a $7 million allowance—and that’s for robes and sandals. Carpenter, on the other hand, would be doing practical special effects in camera. He’d be doing a movie with gore and supernatural nuttiness. In a now-quaint New York Times article from April 1987 titled “Independents Making It Big” (“The major studios have abandoned small, serious, risky films, the kind that often win prizes”), Merchant Ivory’s Oscar-winning A Room With A View gets prime positioning with a big photograph; that one has a $3 million budget, roughly. (Not coincidentally, Carpenter’s financiers, Alive Films, are name-checked in the piece as the producers of Alan Rudolph’s Trouble in Mind.)

Coming off Big Trouble in Little China’s estimated $20 million budget (it was probably more), Carpenter would be making a radical shift. But he agreed to Alive’s terms. He’d return to doing things fast and smart, to distilling his vision down to its cleanest, clearest grammar, to getting it done in 30 days (Halloween was shot in 20, over four weeks in May 1978). Even if you disregard the whole of Prince of Darkness’s content—and we won’t be doing that—Carpenter’s desire to work in total artistic freedom is breathtaking. He will do what it takes to move forward.

A little plot: In Prince of Darkness, scientists, theologians and academics plunge into a dilapidated church where they power up their equipment and study a mysterious genie in a bottle: an “anti-god.” The scenario has some of the pseudo-tech fizz of Poltergeist or, in a lighter vein, the Harold Ramis scenes in Ghostbusters. It’s not meant to hold up under scrutiny. Carpenter, who says he was reading books about quantum uncertainty at the time (maybe not the most comforting bedside material given his professional predicament), gives pages of chewy dialogue to the twin father figures of his oeuvre: Donald Pleasence, returning from Halloween and Escape from New York, plays an unnamed, worried priest; and Big Trouble’s wizened Victor Wong appears as an esteemed professor of metaphysical causality.

If the movie has a conventional hero (it doesn’t), it’s Brian, a student who splits the difference between creepy and generically handsome. He’s played by Jameson Parker, then a TV star on Simon & Simon. Or at least I think it’s Jameson Parker. Unlike his more famous San Diego private detective, Brian sports a robust, porn-star-worthy moustache. It makes him look swarthy, mysterious—a little like the lanky John Carpenter himself, who shoots these early scenes in classrooms and hallways at his alma mater, USC. “I spent many happy years at SC as a film student,” Carpenter says on Shout! Factory’s collector’s Blu-ray. “I really enjoyed myself. I learned everything about how to make movies there.”

Watching Prince of Darkness is as close as we’ll come to seeing the director’s formative years re-enacted, memoir-style. In getting back to basics, Carpenter decided to do it literally. Brian sits in class listening; he has a bit of a Laurie Strode moment looking out the window, distracted. Who is he? He’s a young scientist observing evil, almost flirting with it. He spies on a pretty girl in the courtyard (Lisa Blount). She’s got a boyfriend and it irks him, wordlessly. Later, Brian will woo her to bed and use some hard-core Howard Hawks dialogue on her: “Who was he? The one that gave you such a high opinion of men?” he says, straight out of Lauren Bacall’s playbook in To Have and Have Not. It works. She kisses him.

The movie isn’t all wish-fulfillment. In fact, it’s charming how fully the Carpenter surrogate recedes into the team; Brian isn’t even a factor in the final showdown. Maybe his job is to watch other people vanquish evil. That would make sense, since it’s his creator’s comfort zone. In the meantime, the offscreen Carpenter is building some of his grossest sequences, spraying unsuspecting people in the mouth with streams of ectoplasm (à la Rob Bottin’s landmark FX in The Thing), mounting parallel action and deploying beetles, maggots and ants where necessary.

Prince of Darkness has one moment that’s proven unforgettable, transcending even the horror genre. It’s an eerie transmission, the voice slowed down and distorted: “This is not a dream…not a dream…” DJ Shadow samples it a few times on his groundbreaking debut, 1996’s Endtroducing. (The voice is actually Carpenter’s, impossible not to notice once you’ve been made aware of it.) He’s supposed to be a future dude reaching backward in time—“from the year one, nine, nine, nine”—maybe to prevent a biblical apocalypse. All we see is a jittery handheld shot of a silhouetted robed figure slowly emerging from the church, the ominous end-of-the-world smoke gathering.

The economy of the shot is beautiful, Carpenter achieving the texture of a half-remembered nightmare using only a capture-video-off-a-TV-screen trick. (It’s very Inland Empire—and come to think of it, that basement cylinder of swirling green evil is a lot like the glass box from the first episode of the rebooted Twin Peaks: The Return.) So in a situation where Carpenter is facing his most prohibitive spending limits, he’s actually expanding his craft. Prince of Darkness signals his own creative rehabilitation after turning his heel on the studios. Or, to quote the film’s poster: “It is evil. It is real. It is awakening.”

What does it mean that Carpenter’s big payoff involves a mirror? These Cocteau-like shots were some of the most dangerous to pull off. One of them involved plunging a prosthetic hand into highly toxic liquid mercury (a substance the crew had to drain from their hydraulic cranes just to make the gag work). Then, to capture the action on the “other side” of the mirror, poor Lisa Blount had to swim submerged in a darkened swimming pool while an underwater camera shot upward at the glimmering surface. I include these technical details not only to express awe at Carpenter’s commitment (along with that of his collaborators), but also to stress the obvious: The mirror climax was really important to him. The movie’s final seconds are the whole of Prince of Darkness’s reflexivity in a single cut: Brian, woken from a double dream, approaches his bedroom mirror. We see from the perspective of the glass. He touches that porn ’stache tentatively, then reaches out. Cut to black.

It’s not easy to touch that mirror—to walk away from everything you’ve labored to achieve over years, to a place where it’s just you and your talent and what you can do. To me, that’s what Prince of Darkness expresses, subtly. Creatively, the experiment worked: It led directly to Carpenter’s 1988 stealth masterpiece They Live, his most confident political statement and a kindred project in its use of real L.A. locations. That film’s critical reputation has already been defended at large. But maybe it’s time to rally behind the moment slightly earlier, when the director had to rediscover who he was, and what he wanted—and when he found a way to turn everything around.

Strategies For Locking at the Best Mortgage Rate

Hint Number 5: Always Confirm The Rate-lock Phase When Asking For A Rate QuoteHint #1: Always Look for Home Mortgage RatesThis is how they increase their commission whenever you FLOAT. Originally, the lender lent 4.875percent with 1.00 Entire Point once you requested the loan. Then 4-5 days after you called to Lock-In. Keep in mind that over the 4-5 day period you just were FLOATING, the actual Points for 4.875% dropped to.250 Total Points. So you should have saved.75 Total Points in your own 4.875percent speed. Right? No! To begin with, that you don't know whether his business's issues have dropped or by how much they may have dropped. So, rather than providing you with 4.875percent for.250 Total Points, the home loan Loan Officer lets you know that his rates just dropped only a tiny bit. He says you can Lock-In 4.875percent for.75 Total Points. You are joyful since it is.25 lesser than what it was once you applied for the loan, however the mortgage Loan Officer is thrilled since he keeps 1 / 2 of the"over age" you paidoff. That over age is.50 points and he splits this with his own company. If the mortgage was $400,000, he just earned.25percent that's an additional $1,000 commission. That is not bad for a five minute phone conversation. If you're purchasing a house and also you need 60 days to close, be sure you specifically request Mortgage Cost quotes with a 60-day Lock period. Some Home Mortgage Loan Officers will quote rates with 15 Day or 30 Day Party periods as the Discount Points for shorter lock spans are less than rate locks for extended spans. Quoting a house Mortgage Rate with A15 Day lease period clearly gives that loan-officer a unfair advantage. It is also a waste of your energy as the quote isn't real in case you can't decide on your loan within 1-5 days. Consistently specify a 60-day Lock-In if you are purchasing a home. Require 4-5 Days if you are refinancing, but you can have the ability to have it done within 1 month if you are quite diligent and telephone your mortgage Loan Officer twice a week for a status of one's application. Mortgage Prices change each day and some times mid day. The last day's rates typically browse around this website expire by 8:30 a.m. the next morning. Broadly speaking, home loan Rates are published each day from 11:00 a.m. Eastern moment. To make certain you're receiving mortgage Rates from the current day and not just a mixture of rates by the preceding day out of several lenders and also the recent rates from different lenders, always do your rate shopping after 11:00% Eastern time. Get yourself a copy of the Final Good Faith Estimate at least a day or two before the scheduled final day. Make sure you are getting precisely what you bargained for. Ask questions if you don't understand some thing. Require that undisclosed fees be taken off the Final Good Faith Estimate. Make certain that you receive a revised estimate if the Mortgage Loan Officer verbally agrees to produce changes. When you phone a Mortgage Bank, ask for the"Total Points" (Discount Points, Loan Origination Fee, Broker Points) for every single Mortgage Rate. Some lenders will merely quote the Discount Points and deliberately leave out the Loan Origination Fee. You won't find out regarding the 1.00 Point Loan Origination Fee before you apply to your Mortgage. By that point, the loan-officer amounts you'll only accept it because he has your application and pulled on your credit report. Furthermore, Mortgage Agents often fail to mention their Broker Fee. If you're receiving a government guaranteed mortgage (FHA or VA), you don't need to find yourself in a comparison of the FHA MIP or the VA Funding Fee. This is really a set you back may be paying, nevertheless every lender MUST make use of the exact costs, thus there's absolutely no reason to attempt to compare those costs from lender to lender. If you are purchasing a house, tell the mortgage Loan Officer you are Rate shopping and you have a"ratified contract" to purchase a home. Tell him you intend to create a decision and Lock-In an interest speed on such day, but you have to check a few other lenders. In case he asks you how his rates compare to others, tell him he is the first person you've called. If you are refinancing, tell the mortgage Loan Officer that you are ready to apply for a Refinance mortgage today. If you never tell him that, he may provide a fake mortgage Rate quote. Some creditors do not charge a Loan Origination Fee. The fee of Mortgage Insurance can vary from lender to lender despite the fact that many home loan Loan Officers will say,"We don't determine the Mortgage Insurance policy, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac perform". Your can only say,"Please humor me and supply the regular monthly Mortgage Insurance given as a percentage".Hint #7: After You've Discovered The Lowest Cost Rate, Apply and Lock The RateYou have to nail this down once you talk to a mortgage Loan Officer. FLOATING is a LOSE/LOSE suggestion for you and a WIN/WIN for the Home Mortgage Loan Officer. If the home mortgage Officer thinks you may have a tendency to FLOAT your Speed and Points, he may state,"that I feel that the rates will be coming , and that means you might wish to FLOAT". Remember this, never FLOAT your own home loan Rate. Never. Always Lock-In the Rate and Points. In the event you FLOAT, and also the Discount Points to get home loan Rates drop, you will just realize the benefit of a little portion of that drop in the Points, if any at all. The Home Mortgage Loan Officer will continue to keep the rest of the savings because a fat commission. Hint Number 4: Request The Total Points And The Total FeesHow will you compare quotes for those who really don't know that which quotes are real and which are part of a bait and switch program? The sole way to ensure getting real quotes is to stay in the Home Mortgage Loan Officers by making them think you are ready to Lock-In a home loan Rate instantly. Before you offer your application info, make sure the home loan Loan Officer agrees to provide you with a real Speed Lock confirmation via email or facsimile on exactly the identical day you apply for the loan. It's normal to get a creditor to take you to apply over the device before they will Lock-In your house Mortgage Rate. If your rate lock expires, the lender will re-lock you at higher of either the original rate or even the current speed whenever you make the decision to re-lock. That's a LOSE/LOSE situation for you. Mortgage Loan Officers who work of a referral system of Realtors and Builders don't need to have competitive Home mortgage-rates because they've a steady stream of"Drones" (people who are known in their mind and do not shop) calling them. Check around, obtain the most reasonably priced mortgage Rate, and if you are inclined, approach the"favorite" loan-officer you were referred to and ask him to complement with the quotation. When you were looking for houses or thinking about refinancing, you may have shopped gotten some quotes from lenders and narrowed your search down to the best 5 Home Mortgage Lenders or Brokers. Nevertheless, if it is time to submit an application for the Mortgage, ensure to update your quotes for the lowest priced Home Mortgage Lenders. When you identify the home loan Bank with all the best cost rate, telephone and make an application to your loan. Tell the Mortgage Loan Officer you want to Lock-In your Home Mortgage Rate and use NOW. If the quotation has changed because you upgraded your quotes a couple of hours tell the Loan Officer you would like him to honor the last quotation. In case he won't do it, tell him you will call straight back again. Subsequently call the next cheapest Home Mortgage Bank in your list. If that lender tells you exactly Reverse Mortgage Lenders the same thing, you can return straight back to the first lender and proceed with the application procedure. Loan Lenders understand you may likely talk to another lender with lower home-mortgage Rates and the only way they is certain for you to call him back will be always to give you a bogus quote which appears to be the lowest. He is expecting you will speed shop for several days and figures you can call him back in a day or 2 because he provided a non, fake rate quote. Additionally, since Home Mortgage Rates change daily and are subject to change at any time, he isn't concerned with providing you with a fake quote. Do not blindly accept a Realtor or Contractor referral to apply for a Home Mortgage by using their preferred lender.

Many times they are going to say,"We work closely for this guy and that will get the work done". Remember, the Realtor wont be paying off the bill each month for another 30 years, you will.Hint #9: Get Your Final Good Faith Estimate Several Days Before Loan ClosingGet all your quotes after 11:00 a.m. Eastern time. You will wish to look at the quoted percentage in everything exactly is on your own primary application records and closing loan records to be certain the Monthly Mortgage Insurance payment isn't more than that which you were quoted. When it's, get it paid down instantly. If they will not do that, then ask them to decrease your Home Mortgage Rate by.125percent and which should cover the difference.Tip#6: Compute The Money Cost Of The Points And Add All FeesIn case Mortgage Insurance (not to be confused with mortgage insurance) is required to a Traditional Home Loan, ask for the cost annually expressed as a percent and compare it in lender to lender. Some lenders require different levels of coverage and this will impact your monthly Mortgage Insurance payment. In addition, lenders use many different mortgage companies and so they charge different rates for their coverage. The lending institution will pick the mortgage insurance provider.Hint #3: Always Tell The Home Mortgage Officer You Are Prepared To Apply For A Loan NOWSome-times Home Mortgage Rates change mid day due to a volatile bond market. While this happens, some home loan Lenders will adapt the Discount Points because of their rates in accordance with the brand newest bond prices and publish brand new mortgage Rates for that day. Additional Lenders may continue to honor their dawn prices. Some companies quote really low prices and bring lots of software, however they do not let you Lock-In until 1-5 Days prior to loan closing. If you try to make an application for a Mortgage by way of a company with that policy, then you can receive screwed. When it is the right time for you to Lock-In your Mortgage Rate, you will pay an"over age" that will go straight to the Mortgage Loan lien. You will either cover more points for the speed you requested at time of application or you will get a greater rate. Either way, you will get the Loan Officer will find a fat over-age added to your own commission. After you've spent any time conversing with a number of home loan Officers, you'll have lots of Rates, Points and Charges onto a sheet of paper. You need to calculate the money cost of this Factors (multiply the mortgage amount X that the Total Factors expressed as a percent; For example, multi ply 400,000 mortgage amount X.625 percent for.625 Factors ). Then put in the dollar cost of the points to the Overall Fees. You can then compare each home loan Lender's Total Cost (dollar price of the points + all creditor related fees) for a given rate. This may highlight which mortgage Lender gets the lowest cost home loan Rates. If you apply for a property Mortgage through a favorite lender without shopping, you will probably pay hundreds or maybe thousands of dollars at additional expenses. A lender will quote these on your Good Faith Estimate, but these charges are not associated with costs associated with a Mortgage Rate quote. The amount required for the escrow accounts isn't going to change from lender to lender and Title Business and Attorney Fees aren't being charged by the lender. Do not include them in your own comparison. Also, request a list of the rest of the fees that will appear on the fantastic Faith Estimate you will be committing to the Bank or Broker. Make sure they include their credit history and Appraisal Fees. Some creditors charge you lump sum fee and which includes the credit file and Appraisal Fees while other lenders will itemize each fee.

Radicalism in Medieval Settings and the Scioa’tael

One of the most common complaints hurled against the Scioa’tael and its members is that, “they’re terrorists”. This slight is hard to refute, because, according to the most basic definition of terrorist– i.e. “ a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims “– they are. However, as this essay will explain, calling the Scioa’tael terrorists overlooks several centuries of social, political, and martial development, making it an unfair comparison. 

First, we must address the elephant in the room. We live in a post 9/11 world; many of us from the United States grew up in the atmosphere of pervasive fear that dominated the Bush era and the so-called War on Terror. Other nations have been similarly affected by their own tragedies, their own acts of terrorism, both foreign and domestic. This makes it difficult to talk about terrorism because it evokes deeply rooted emotions, for everyone, and understandably so. Even so, we must endeavor to dissociate our present connotations from the word itself, in order to better discuss terrorism both as it now exists and how it functioned in medieval societies. The main problem with terrorism in modern free societies, and why it is particularly reviled, is that it is fundamentally unnecessary. In cultures where people are guaranteed the right to vote, protest, and assemble, resorting to violence, especially violence against civilians, is abhorrent because the will of the people can be expressed through other ways. Voting out people whose political views we disagree with and protesting unjust laws with marches and rallies are just two of the ways in which citizens of a democracy can communicate and enforce their wishes. 

Of course, even in a democracy, there are ways in which the will of the people can be subverted. Systemic factors like social class mean that the rich individuals and powerful companies can afford to lobby and donate money to politicians in ways that the poor cannot. Heck, I have seen politicians win the popular vote but still lose the presidential election twice in my lifetime thanks to the weird setup of the American electoral college. However, even with these issues, citizens still have important, legal rights that protect their ability to assemble and protest…. rights that were largely absent under feudal systems like the world of the Witcher. The consideration of this setting is what we will discuss in the rest of this essay, to better contextualize the Scioa’tael as a movement, and to led to a discussion of revolution under oppressive regimes.

SECTION I: FEUDAL SOCIETY

I. Contextualizing the Problem

Before we can even begin to talk about the social context of the Scioa’tael, we need to try and establish what kind of world the Witcher takes place in. Although, obviously, the setting is fictional, our best bet is to try and draw connections between the Witcher universe and our own. 

One of the easiest ways to narrow our focus is to try and establish what historical time-frame the Witcher roughly corresponds to. Now, there are multiple ways to do this, but I will focus primarily on the technology, vocabulary, and historical references. Of course, this is difficult, because the fantastical elements in the Witcher use very modern terms. For example, the words “mutagen” (1946) and “gene” (1909) which both appear in the series, were only conceived in the 20th century, which clashes heavily with the Witcher’s decidedly medieval aesthetic. However, these words are derived from pre-existing French/Latin bases, so they could have hypothetically been devised earlier in the universe of the Witcher to fulfill a need. (Sorceresses, after all, are able to do some pretty incredible things, and they clearly have an advanced understanding of biology. See: the fact that they can intentionally mutate living organisms via gene therapy.) 

As for historical references, we can see a few characters mentioned in the Witcher universe who have clear parallels to real life figures. For example, Dandelion mentions a revolutionary named “Joan of the Arc Coast”, whose name is obviously very close to Joan of Arc. The real life Joan of Arc lived between 1412 and 1431. Further backing up this rough estimate for the time period is the fashion. We see several men in the Witcher series wearing chaperons (Roche’s head-gear of choice), that became particularly fashionable in the 15th century. The attire of most nobles (hose, a tunic, and shoes) also fits with this time-frame.

This places the Witcher during the medieval period. 

II. The Medieval Period in Europe Was Especially Shitty, and Here’s Why! 

In news that probably surprises absolutely no one, the medieval period was pretty awful for anyone who wasn’t a rich male noble. The primary economic and political system was feudalism, a social structure that’s basically a pyramid. At the bottom of this structure were the peasants and serfs, who worked the land overseen by knights and vassals, who in turn reported to lords, who answered to the monarchy. Obviously, in this structure the king had absolute power, and the serfs practically none. 

This imbalance of power was maintained in a multitude of ways. For starters, even though peasants comprised the majority of European populations, they lacked the resources of the upper classes. If they wanted to resist with physical force, they could find themselves up against knights: men with expensive life-saving armor who were literally trained since childhood to fight. And refusing to pay their taxes simple wasn’t an option– they didn’t even legally own the land they worked on, remember. Even free peasants still technically rented their land from their lords. If they refused to work, they could suffer terrible repercussions, and without the ability to unionize or go on strike en masse any attempts to hurt their lords by refusing to work would fail. 

An additional form of control was the church. The clergy helped maintain the power structure of the feudal system by “sanctify[ing] the divine rule of the king and justify[ing] royal measures to the rest of the population” (Ishay). Under conventional European feudalism, the church was not “a free agent… but rather an intrinsic part of the apparatus of power” (Ishay). 

Now, admittedly, the religious structures in the Witcher are different than that of the Catholic church in medieval Europe. For starters, Catholicism was incredibly influential precisely because of how singular and all-encompassing it was. “Religion permeated every pore of medieval life,” (Ishay). However, in the Witcher universe, there are at least several different religious organizations in the North. The cult of Melitele is “the most widespread” of all the Nordling’s religions, but even so it is a far cry from the utter domination of the Catholic church in Western Europe. (Of course, eventually this would change during the Protestant Reformation, and the Orthodox Church has always held sway in the East. But the important factor here is more that there was utter hegemony by one religious institution than what institution it was.) 

Despite this difference, we do see that religious institutions do seem to prop up the monarchy in the world of the Witcher, even if their reach isn’t as lengthy. We see priests at peace talks, on battlefields, and most importantly performing coronations. Nobles still use the excuse of divine right to justify their actions and their rule. Clearly, this parallels the rhetoric used in medieval Europe. To my own interpretation, although the Cult of Melitele is no stand-in for the Catholic Church, it still bolstered the institution of feudalism.

Feudalism was a system of finance as much as a governmental one, and as such examining the economies of the Northern kingdoms can provide further insight to the political weight (or lack thereof) of the lower classes. Now, towards the end of the medieval period there was an increase in the power of merchants and traders-- essentially, the foundation of what we today call nouveau riche; people who were not from genteel families rising to prominence (think of the Medici in Florence). This correlated to the flourishing of city-states and the birth of the middle class. There was also a corresponding increase in the right to own private property; something that, while uncontroversial today, was revolutionary at the time. 

"The gradual decline of feudalism and its monopolistic economy, for instance, eventually would lead to the free markets of capitalism based on the concept of the individual’s right to private property, thereby providing greater individual autonomy and opportunities for the beneficiaries to transform their newfound economic power into political power.” (Lauren)

Of course, this point would be meaningless if the Witcher did not have a similar economy to typical ones in medieval Europe. Fortunately for us, it is-- or at the very least, it appears to be. Although Geralt isn’t exactly reading newspapers with descriptions of the stock market, we can see several things that provide insight into the fiscal reality of the Nordling economy. From what we can see, there is a decent merchant class in cities like Vizima, Flotsam, and Novigrad, and there is clearly a class of people who have risen themselves up above their station. This implies that the economic situation in the North does resemble that of late medieval Europe. 

However, it is important to note that greater economic mobility did not necessarily contribute to the development of better freedoms and living conditions nearly as much as other factors.  “As long as the public realm was dormant, closely linked to the private realm, and subservient to religious and feudal authority, the state, however backward, was still uncontested” (Ishay). Funnily enough, the sense of community built up through religious institutions eventually lead to people having a public outlet for their frustrations... but the world of the Witcher isn’t there yet, and so that will remain a topic for another day. 

SECTION II: THE ETHICS OF TERRORISM, ESPECIALLY IN A FEUDAL SOCIETY        

I. There Are No Alternatives

As shitty as it is to say, there really aren’t many options for nonhumans in the North. Hell, there aren’t many options for anyone in the North, even human peasants. Like we discussed above, the feudal system was crappy all around, and particularly resistant to change, as “no significant public space permitted democratic communication between the peasantry and feudal authorities” (Ishay). In some cases, like in Russia and parts of Eastern Europe serfdom continued up until “the wars, revolutions, and upheavals of the nineteenth century br[oke] practices of the past” (Lauren). 

Considering how marginalized nonhumans are, is it really surprising that the Scioa’tael formed? Although peaceful methods of resistance might be possible, it remains a fact that feudalism leaves no room “for the advancement of political and economic rights” (Ishay). Let us not forget what Dandelion says about nonhuman rights:

“It is a fact that, as the scrawlings on the wall of the University of Oxenfurt say: "Pacifying nonhumans is like wallowing in mud – everyone gets dirty, generally with blood."”

The dream of the Scioa’tael for a world in which they can self-determine, and have the same freedoms and respect that humans enjoy, is dangerous. Because “these visions of human rights possess the capacity to challenge, to generate fear, to hold out hope and inspire, and to change the world” (Lauren).     

In light of these facts, I don’t think that it’s really possible to deny that open rebellion is pretty much the only way for the Scioa’tael to gain any rights. As for how bad nonhumans have it... well, that’s an essay for another day. I’ll just say that there is definitely some racial/ethnic coding going on with the nonhumans, and that we can use this to form an even more grim outlook of their prospects than the already bleak view offered by the novels and video game series. 

II. Methodology and the Ethics of War

Now that we have established that nonhumans have almost no choices or ability to enact political change by peaceful means, we can now talk about the morality of terrorism, and try to come to a consensus about the Scioa’tael. 

Of course, ethics are inherently subjective. Although I have described, at length, how revolution in feudal societies practically demands violence, I am sure that some of you will remain unconvinced. That’s your prerogative. I think that it’s crazy, but you do you I guess. But for the rest of us, we now have to address the muddy waters of rebellion and warfare. Namely: what makes war just? What actions are permissible in war?

These questions are not easy to answer. Some believe that, as long as the cause is just, any action is justified; others that just actions are what make the cause just. I think that the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. 

This brings up another issue: namely, that the Scioa’tael don’t function as a single unit. Each unit reports to a commander, and therefore the conduct of each commando can vary wildly. For example, the unnamed leader of one Scioa’tael group abducted Ves as a young woman, keeping her as his sex slave and prisoner. Other commanders are more discerning-- although they may torch villages and kill merchants who infringe on their territories, these Scioa’tael don’t seem to take prisoners for such extended periods of time and seem to have some sense of decency. Sure, they’ll torture their enemies for information, but they draw the line at, you know, raping children.    

Two of the main criteria for defining whether a cause is just or not are just cause and right intention: i.e are you fighting for a good reason? And do you have good intentions? And in the case of most Scioa’tael groups, we can assuredly say that they have just cause (they want freedom), and right intentions (that one only does actions with the goal of seeing your cause realized-- and that you intend to stop when you win).    

And two of the main aspects of the waging of war itself is that of proportionality and non-combatant immunity. The ideal of proportionality essentially states that you should not use unnecessary force: or at the very least, force that is not greater than what you enemies use against you. Non-combatant immunity states that you should, you know, only attack viable military targets. 

Considering that the Scioa’tael aren’t using methods more extreme than the humans, we see that the moral of proportionality is maintained. Really, the only point of contention with the Scioa’tael is the principle of non-combatant immunity. Of course, the Scioa’tael would make the argument that humans violate this principle every day, and that they are only responding in kind; or they might make the argument that all humans are part of the system of oppression and thus bear some culpability for it. 

SECTION III: CONCLUSION  

In the previous sections, I have laid out the social context and justification for the Scioa’tael as best I can. I can’t offer a simple, easy answer as to whether they are doing the right thing or not. Their methods are definitely questionable, but, as American Revolutionary Thomas Paine once said, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” However, I do hope that this essay can help elevate the discourse from mud-slinging the term “terrorist” to an honest discussion, especially one that takes the sociopolitical setting of the Witcher into account instead of borrowing the word’s modern connotations wholesale. I think that, although difficult, the ethical questions raised about warfare and conduct are things that we must all consider, especially given the way the political climate is turning. How far can we go to defend liberty? Under what conditions are acts of violence permissible?  

References  

Ishay, Micheline R. The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008   

Lauren, Paul Gordon. The Evolution of International Human Rights: Visions Seen (Third Edition). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011 

“Mutagen”, “Gene”. Oxford English Dictionary, www.oed.com. Retrieved 04/28/18.  

Steinhoff, Uwe. On the Ethics of War and Terrorism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007 

The Id - The Inner Sounds of The Id

This is a story about The Inner Sounds of the Id. Perhaps two, or maybe even three stories. It is also a story about what were once the unknown musicians that made it happen. There was no mention of who the musicians were on the album, but they were finally identified many years later. One of the band members, Glenn Cass, wrote that it all began sometime in 1966. Cass admits he is “not sure of times and dates” in the Facebook page biography of The Inner Sounds of the Id. In that biography Cass says Arnold Sukonick approached Capitol Records producer/arranger Jimmy Haskell concerning a recording project he had in mind. Haskell put Sukonick, who started calling himself Paul Arnold, in touch with Jerry Cole. In turn Cole brought in musician friends Cass and Don Dexter and they started working with Arnold’s material.

Paul Arnold (Sukonick) was an avant-garde composer with some pretty eclectic ideas for a recording project. This included time signatures, such as 17/8, 20/8 and 7/4, that he could only verbalize about. Taking suggested composition from Arnold, Jerry Cole, Glenn Cass and Don Dexter started working from jams following the time signatures Arnold suggested. As things took shape the three musicians convinced Arnold that they form a band, adding Glenn’s brother Norm Cass on guitar, and Rich Cliburn on guitar/keyboards to the existing Cole on lead guitar, Cass on bass and Dexter on drums.

Some information contained in the next two paragraphs is from a portion of Don Dexter’s article, The Story of the Id, which was provided by Glenn Cass, who’s insights are also included in these paragraphs and beyond,

While Arnold took most of the credit for the album, most of the material was arranged and worked out by the band, including some of their own original songs. The band spent eight months writing, arranging and rehearsing in preparation for recording which eventually lead up to the album. Barry Stoller said in his article From Inner Sounds to Astro Sounds in PopMatters, “Recorded between 1965 and '66 (according to drummer Don Dexter), a massive collection of tracks was paired down to ten cuts and released by RCA.” (In the 2018 obituary for Don Dexter, it incorrectly says that The Id project occurred in 1968.) During that time all band members were busy with other projects. For instance Don Dexter played drums for Glenn Yarbrough for an album recording followed by a nationwide tour. Once Don returned in November he continued rehearsing with The Id until they wrapped that up later in the month. Dexter said, “We were well rehearsed.” They then went into the studio and completed recording ten songs. The sessions lasted less than three weeks, and included adding vocals and all overdubs.

All the while the band members were lead to believe that they would get credited for their work and artistic creation, and receive appropriate renumeration for it. Dexter said that “they were promised a large chunk of “front money” as soon as they signed with a record label, along with the royalties from sales.”, but they were never paid for the all the rehearsals and the recording of the album. While Arnold paid for the sessions, without consulting the band he had signed with RCA. Don Dexter complained, “The five of us opposed this because, when pressing the records, RCA had a history of putting the voices on top and then (using) filters that muffle the drums and bass so much that a person can hardly hear the rhythm section.” Glenn Cass further added, “RCA Victor took the group and gave Arnold $25.000.00 up front. We never saw a dime.”

The album by The Id was released in May 1967. The liner sleeve has limited information, but it does say that Paul Arnold created and produced The Inner Sounds of the Id. On the record it says two songs, The Rake and Butterfly Kiss, were written and arranged by Arnold, and that he wrote four others and was co-writer of one more. His songwriting credits are on the record by last name only, so it was presumed to be referring to Paul Arnold. Thanks to information retrieved much later the full names have come clear. Guitarist Jerry Cole wrote two songs while having co-written two more. The entire band is credited on one song, along with “Elijah”. The record also said this mysterious Elijah co-wrote one other song. It turns out that Elijah was Jack Good, who was the British co-producer of the American television show Shindig, among other things. The brief liner notes, which is a fanciful description of what Paul Arnold created in this music, have Jack Good’s signature at the end of them, but Barry Stoller, in his Feb. 19, 2015 article From Inner Sounds to Astro Sounds in PopMatters, attributes it to Paul Arnold.

The Id made its’ live performance debut to promote the impending album in Chicago IL at the insistence of the producer. Band members felt it would have been better to go to San Francisco, which was more open for a modern, experimental sound. The debut took place at the Happy Medium, an intimate theater club on Rush Street. There was a blurb in the Feb. 25, 1967 issue of Billboard Magazine saying, “The Id brings its "inner sounds" to the Pussycat Wednesday (February 22). Group includes Jerry Cole, Don Dexter, Glenn Cass, Rich Cliburn and Norman Cass”. Turns out Billboard was wrong about the actual venue. The Pussycat was in the basement. Glenn Cass says, “we were in the theater”.

The gig was scheduled to be an extended run and the first performance was for a special audience that included RCA executives, radio and media. It was a big deal. They were all on their own risers under spotlights with a light show with strobes. Hollywood fashion designer Harvey Krantz designed uniforms, that could be worn two ways, for them. Playing this music live in concert for the first times was quite challenging. The band wasn’t getting paid properly and Cass estimates within two weeks they were at Chicago O’Hare ready to fly back to LA to get back to other projects. “The Id was over.”

Or was it? It seems that while The ID may have been over, The inner Sounds of the Id was just getting off the ground. On March 11, 1967 a full page ad promoting The Id album ran in Billboard Magazine. In the same issue a Spotlight Singles review appeared predicting the single being released, Short Circuit, could hit the Top 60. The “New Album Releases” section of the May 6th Billboard issue announced that the Id’s album was arriving in stores. That was followed a month later in the June 3rd issue with a short album Pop Spotlight: “One of those groups that is experimenting in sounds. “Wild Times” borders on the non-musical, the tune “The Inner Sound of the Id” is weird enough to capture aficionados of the new kind of rock, and put this LP on the chart.” What was predicted failed to materialize. A week later Dave Diamond, a DJ at KFWB, promoted a concert featuring The Id at Valley Music Theater in LA on Saturday June 10. An ad for the show was published in the June 9 issue of the Los Angeles Free Press. When asked how that could be, Glenn Cass opined: “I think he tried to put together another Id.”

It is estimated that the sales of the album were in the neighborhood of 250,000. It continues to be of cult interest as an album ahead of its’ time.

TRACKS

Jerry Cole, Glenn Cass and Rich Cliburn, did the lead vocals on the songs. Each of them had at least one song on the album. At times Cole and Glenn doubled up on lead vocals, and Glenn also sang harmony on some songs. Jerry Cole was the lead arranger on all the songs. Everyone in the group contributed to building the “sound”, and such things as the rhythm of the 17/8 time signature. Don Dexter interpreted all the percussion, building all the drum breaks, tempos, and fills. Another statement has been made that Jerry and Glenn wrote most of the songs.

The opening song is The Rake. A challenging and frenetic piece (also called “hyperactive” in an album description by Bear Cat Records) written by Paul Arnold. It  definitely has a song structure with an unusual time signature. In a comment by tlow0510 regarding a blog called Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur, The Rake is called “a guitar reverb masterpiece, guitar and bass interplay pretty nicely and elevate the psychedelia experience.” In an album review in Rate Your Music - Sonemic Inc. (in association with Amazon), iauc comments, ”The Rake is precisely the best here thanks to its haunting melody and psychedelic guitars.” The Rake starts the record off with more of a question mark than an answer as to what else to expect from the album though. It was released as a second single in May ’67 b/w Wild Times with no documentation as to how it fared.

Wild Times just keeps one guessing. It is somewhat of a blues-rocker that comes on breathlessly until it suddenly shifts into a contrapuntal melody with a  different meter. Bear Cat Records offers that “different genres collided - check out the blue-eyed soul-meets Eastern sitar freak out.” Ritchie Unterberger referred to “gratuitous overlay of sitar sounds”. At the time Richie may have written this opinion he likely did not have this particular insight given by Glenn Cass , “By the way folks. There was no sitar on this album. Jerry was playing an Appalachian Dulcimer.” To be fair Unterberger called it sitar “sounds”, so perhaps he wasn’t being precise as to what instrument it really was. According to Glenn Cass, Rich Cliburn sings the first verse, and Cass the second one. After the dulcimer section it sounds like Cass sings the remaining verse. Harmonies are likely Cass and Rich, as well as Cass and Cole. tlow0510’ adds this positive comment in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur blog, “Wild Times has great flamenco guitar that Cole adds a short sound wavelength tremolo to”. Wild Times’ title, instrumentation and lyrics, leave little doubt that the psychedelic flourishes in this song are wild times indeed.

Don’t Think Twice was one of the two songs indicated as a Jerry Cole composition. While that is how it ended up getting published, Glenn Cass states that he co-wrote it, but received no credit. He is also the lead vocalist and he and Jerry sing the harmonies. Don’t Think Twice is the only straight-ahead rocker on the album and may have been the song that could have gotten some attention had it been released as a single. Glenn Cass’ bass is punchy, and Jerry’s guitar rings throughout the song. 

Stone and Steel, with a somewhat syncopated rhythm, tells a dark tale of childhood to maturity. It seems correct of Richie Unterberger to call this psych-folk-rock. In this case the psych may refer more to psyche than psychedelic.

Baby Eyes is the poppiest song on the album, and while not being particularly eclectic or unusual, it is shown to be written by Paul Arnold. In addition to referring to it as pop/rock, Richie Unterberger also calls it “garage”. tlow0510 comment in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur Blog  says “Baby Eyes" lets the bass player shine. Nice runs. He practiced his scales.” Not only that, bassist Glenn Cass was the lead vocalist as well.

If there is any doubt that Boil the Kettle, Mother is psychedelic, as it is considered by several sources, it most certainly qualifies as such. Richie Unterberger slyly calls it “nonchalant oddness”. The mysterious Elijah (Jack Good) makes his appearance with droning spoken word over a pounding beat and breath-taking guitar work by Jerry Cole. It’s no wonder that this song was an underground FM and college favorite at the time, and continues to fascinate cult fans of psychedelic and progressive music. In album reviews in Rate Your Music-Sonemic Inc. (in association with Amazon), this is a sampling of comments about the song: Tovan called it a “Barrett-esqe track, in reference to Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, iauc says "Boil The Kettle Mother" also marks another high point with its insane guitars and bizarre vocals”, and tlow0510 comment in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur blog refers to the “standout track”, which “has spoken vampire voice.”

Described as “crazed folk” music by Bear Cat Records, Butterfly Kiss is a love analogy that ends with a wish to fly away with a butterfly. Music journalist Eileen Kaufman’ July 14, 1967 article, “Latest AcidRock Groups Reach Multiple Mind Level” in the Los Angeles Free Press, calls it “a baroque ditty —— done with female vocal obligato and male voice on the melody. The accompaniment ranges from baroque chamber music to a Slavic beat at the finale.” In a Customer Review on the album site on Amazon, Gologanov Alexey calls Butterfly Kiss an “absolutely unbelievable masterpiece of baroque with fine strings, exquisite female singing and a harmony which endlessly evolves in spiral, without repeating itself.” Indeed it’s composer, Paul Arnold Solunek was an accomplished violinist. Since there were no credits to any musicians on the liner sleeve it can only be surmised that he was responsible for the string arrangement as well as the performance. The source of the female voice was unnamed, but it is possible that it may be Tsvia Abrabanal, of Tsvia & The Followers. She and Sukonick had met for the first time earlier in the ‘60s. They worked together on his Moon Express recording project following The Inner Sound of the Id. While those recordings were completed in 1969 it was not released as an album until Sukonick’s nephew completed it and released Prophetic Spirit posthumously in 2019. The voice in that music sounds similar to the one in Butterfly Kiss.

I

The first single released from the album, Short Circuit b/w Boil the Kettle, Mother, got the attention of Billboard Magazine as it was released in March ’67: “Off-beat weirdy has all the ingredients for a teen-identifiable smash. Clever, pulsating beat and production featuring far out guitar sounds and strong group vocal.” With Jerry Cole and Glenn Cass on vocals, Cole’s guitar is dependably evident, but it is Cass’s winding bass that leads the way through the song. That nothing came of the single afterwards may be explained, at least in part, by the fact that The Id had disbanded just as Billboard unveiled it. Both these songs, along with the long closing cut, The Inner Sound of the Id, became popular on underground radio stations in L.A. in the late 1960s.” according to the album description in Tasty Odds associated with label World of Sounds.

Just Who is the other number attributed to Jerry Cole. It is an energetic rocker that has rhythmic spoken word lyrics throughout, somewhat in the vein of The Troggs’ Wild Thing. A harmony chorus comes in at about a minute ten seconds until the conclusion of the song. It is again a display of Glenn Cass’ strong winding bass, but additionally he is the lead vocalist, in what he has referred to as a “shit song”. Some of the songs like Just Who, that are in the Youtube full album link included in references below, are in mono rather than stereo sound. There is a marked difference between the mono and the stereo versions, particularly with vocals. As tlow0510 in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur blog opined about the stereo version of the album, “… the vocals are awwwwwfffuuuuullll. They're only in the right channel. As a result they sounded distant and distracting compared to the mono version.”

There have been a variety of opinions in regard to the final track. The Inner Sound of the Id, composed by Paul Arnold, has had a very mixed critical reception. At ten and half minutes there is speculation as to whether it is a creative example of psychedelia, or  just filler. It moves through the instrumental intro, as Eileen Kaufman puts it, ”merging into the poetry recited by an eerie voice discussing Psyche, Libido and the Id - and how each affects your senses”. The afore-mentioned Jack “Elijah” Good is the spoken word vocalist over a slowly mounting instrumental build up until two-thirds of the way through The album’s first song, The Rake, plays in entirety and leads to a slowly fading finish. The Jerry Cole-played dulcimer is reminiscent of the album’s second song, Wild Times. Kaufman also had this to say about the last track of the same name, “The entire selection builds to a mysterious climax while the dulcimer solo blows your mind.” At least somebody knew those sitar sounds were actually made by a dulcimer.

—-Further opinions.

>ProgMusic Paradise blog calls it the “the high point of the album, "The inner sound of The Id", with a completely acidic atmosphere”.

>A “ten-minute final track is the stereotypical dark-indo-esoteric-sitar bungle” per wago album review in Rate Your Music-Sonemic Inc. (in association with Amazon).

>“Another standout track” according to tlow0510 comment in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur Blog, who goes on to say, “The Inner Sound of the ID" has samples from earlier tracks on the album and seems like it was written while they were exploring the id of their minds.”

>iauc album review in Rate Your Music-Sonemic Inc. (in association with Amazon) scathingly writes, the album “may have been a major addition to the extensive catalog of psychedelic rarities, but the final 10 bland minutes of "The Inner Sounds Of The Id" take away any chance”, and “the truth is that this failed recitation on a background with oriental overtones is a good sample of the excesses of the period.”

>And finally, Bear Cat Records says the “ten minute title track, complete with extended sitar, marshal drumming and earnest chanting is must-hear hysterical.”

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While there are differences in opinion, a case can be made that much of the music on The Inner Sound of the Id was quintessentially psychedelic., even though the band did not set out to make it that. Richie Unterberger questioned whether this was done artistically, or rather was an exploitation of the developing  psychedelia culture. Reflecting back, Glenn Cass intones, “Psych my ass! As far as I can remember, we never looked at this session as psychedelic. We went into this to do an album with different time signatures that no one had ever done. We knew nothing about psych, we were almost all playing country (music). We agreed to do this between us cause we had done everything else so why not try this.” As to it being exploitive of the expanding psychedelia culture, the only thing that Cass had to add is that they were “also thinking the big break and money was possible.”

In regards to Unterberger’s thought as to it was done artistically, one need only review the long and thoughtful efforts that were put into preparing for and creating this album, which happened to occur in the midst of what came to be known as psychedelic music. After the fact, many things have come to be associated with psychedelia in music. These can include disjunctive song structures such as time and key signatures, modal and drone concepts, lyrics that can be surreal, esoteric, whimsical, inspired by literature, unusual instrumental and studio effects and enhancement and the use of exotic instrumentation, and extended instrumental parts, or jams. Most of this can be found in the work and results of what went into The Inner Sounds of the Id. It seems safe to say that none of the participants were drugged out young people tripping out over mind-expanding substances, even if that may be what happened with some of folks who ended up listening to The Id’s music, be they younger or older.

As to other comments:

-Richie Unterberger used terms like “weird in a forced, mediocre fashion”. “makes it sound more like an exploitation of psychedelic movement than a genuine part of it”., “chanted pseudo-séance vocals” emulating “freakishness, or a “kind of mediocre California psychedelic band”, “strange on-the-sleeve efforts”, “gratuitous overlay of sitar sounds”, “outlandish lyrics, poker-faced spoken vocal”.

-D&J blog in Wings of Dream June 22, 2011 “By 1967 psychedelia had become trendy and commercial. Major labels released goofy, self-conscious experimental rock records that didn’t have a chance to make the charts, obscure major-label psychedelic product of the time, psychsploitation, cash in on a fad rather than sincere ambitious musical endeavor, strange guitar reverb and distortion, dashes of sitar, pseudo-Eastern musical and mystical influences, shortage of good songs and ideas, aura of strained attempt to be freaky. The presence of well-traveled Los Angeles session guitarist Jerry Cole on the LP makes one wonder if the Inner Sound of the Id were a studio-only group.”

-ProgMusic Paradise blog September 11, 2019 says “by 1967 and at the time of their album release, the musicians of The Id were a bit older and more experienced than other ordinary psychedelic artists. The album starts with weak pop compositions but gradually sinks deeper into psychedelia with fuzz, distortion, echo effects and meditative chants. the high point of the album, "The inner sound of The Id", with a completely acidic atmosphere.”

-Bad Cat Records album description says, referring to “psychedelic touches”, “Interestingly, when I first heard the album it didn't strike me as the year's most original package.  That was before I realized when this thing was recorded - 1967!, Upbeat, varied and enthusiastic, major psych reference books describes the set as "Beatles influenced”.

From Rate Your Music-Sonemic Inc. (in association with Amazon) album review comments:

>Tovan review September 26, 2007 says good, trippy psychedelia with some odd twists and turns. A bit maldirected at times, but with some really nice tracks.

>wago review December 2, 2007 loaded with compound meters (in agreement with “Don Ellis”), style is typically garage-psych, but the songs feature very strong melodies and a wonderful Sixties/Beatlesque/Love allure, A bit ingenuous at times, but never sounding unaccomplished, ten-minute final track is the stereotypical dark-indo-esoteric-sitar bungle.

>iauc November 21, 2008 says “it may have been a major addition to the extensive catalog of psychedelic rarities, but the final 10 bland minutes of "The Inner Sounds Of The Id" take away any chance, ailed recitation on a background with oriental overtones,” ”The Rake" is precisely the best here thanks to its haunting melody and psychedelic guitars”, "Boil The Kettle Mother" also marks another high point with its insane guitars and bizarre vocals, other consistent and more conventional songs in a predominantly garage style and a few folk touches.” 

>tymeshifter review January 29, 2011 says “actually a great punk/psych album, considerably more talented and better sounding (through better production) than most typical punk groups, little denying the presence of a punk element on this record, inclusion of famed session man Jerry Cole in their personnel was also a guarantee this was going to be interesting.”

>CooperBolan October 2, 2015 says “underground garage psych band, pretty raw and simple psychedelic rock tracks.”

>tlow0510 comment in Mono and Stereo Comparison (thread) by imgur Blog 2018 says style is “Psychedelic Rock, Garage Psych”, “fantastic psychedelia masterpiece, bass and vocals compliment the reverberated flamenco and jazz influenced guitar playing, guitar/sitar psych album.” “It seems like a lot of organ was ham-fisted into psych records back then.” “guitar and bass interplay pretty nicely and elevate the psychedelia experience.”

BAND MEMBERS AND PRODUCER

Jerry Cole (born Gerald Kolbrak September 23, 1939 Green Bay WI-died May 28, 2008 Corona CA) was raised in Chicago, but by his late teens had returned to Green Bay. He and Glenn Cass met up at the time Jerry was playing guitar in jazz and swing bands. They started playing some rock and country music together. Cass, who was a guitarist as well, said he helped Jerry learn rock guitar licks. Jerry formed a band called Jerry Cole & The Flaming Coals with Cass, Tom “TC” Gebheim, Larry Russell and Fritz Rueblien. After Gebheim left the band Don Dexter joined as the drummer. They played for about a year at a local club called the Piccadilly. In 1959 The Champs came to town  while on tour supporting their hit, Tequila. After playing at the Riverside Ballroom they stopped in at the Piccadilly and ended up sitting in with the Flaming Coals.

After some time following the end of the Flaming Coals’ gig at Piccadilly, Jerry Cole along with Cass and Dexter played in the Johnny Pike Quartet at the Caravan Club in Colorado Springs CO for awhile. Jerry then moved to Los Angeles where he had been invited to join The Champs as lead guitarist. Glenn Campbell also joined to replace Johnny Meeks. Cole and Campbell later left the band and ended up putting out a single together as The Cee Gees called Buzzsaw Twist b/w Annie Had a Party.

Jerry started finding work in the energetic LA music scene. He became pseudonymously involved with several budget record albums released by Crown Records, with some that actually included his name . In the meantime he lead the surf rock band Jerry Cole & His Spacemen and had three albums released by Capitol Records. Glenn Cass was in the band, as was TC Gebheim. They were the first to cover the song written by Michael Z. Gordon, Outer Limits, which was first recorded by Gordon’s band The Routers. In subsequent versions the song was called Out of Limits after Rod Serling sued because of the non-permitted use of the four note motif from Twilight Zone. Gordon founded The Marketts, who had a No.3 hit version of his song. The Ventures followed up with another popular version.

Cole became an in-demand session guitarist by the time The Byrds went into the studio for the first time. Their producer Terry Melcher was not confident in their capability at that time and brought in members of the Wrecking Crew to back up Jim McGuinn, who sang lead and played 12-string guitar. The studio musicians included Cole as well as Larry Knechtel, Leon Russell and Hal Blaine. The songs recorded, which went on the first hit single, were Mr. Tambourine Man and the B-side I Knew I’d Want You. During this time period Cole also recorded on Nancy Sinatra’s These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ and Paul Revere & The Raiders’ Kicks, among others. He was with bands on TV shows Hullabaloo and Shindig while leading or participating in bands with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Roger Miller and Ricky Nelson. Cole was first-call guitarist in TV bands for Andy Williams, Sonny & Cher, Smothers Brothers, Laugh In and Dick Van Dyke. As part of the Wrecking Crew he recorded on Phil Spector productions. Additionally Cole was often part of the Gene Davis and Red Rhodes incarnations at the Palomino and other clubs off and on through 1969.

In the process of “becoming the most prolific session guitarist in history”, as mentioned by Barry Stoller, Jerry Cole once again got into the nebulous world of pseudonymous record albums courtesy of Alshire Records of 101 Strings notoriety. Session tracks and/or outtakes from the Id recording sessions became at least part of the basis for several "psychsploitation" budget recordings. Cole’s  involvement, as well that of other musicians, perhaps was  inadvertent, but there no way of knowing whether it was, or not.

Alshire’s owners, Al Sherman and DL Miller decided to cash in on the new music happening in the mid-to-late ‘60s. The first act to release an album on the label other than 101 Strings was The Animated Egg. All album tracks are attributed to David Leonard Miller and Al Sherman. In one of several descriptions Barry Stoller says of the music, “A mad pastiche of bump-and-grind, transcendental arpeggios, proto-metal swagger and laser-beam leads reaching a crescendo of post-punk deconstruction (on "Sock It My Way"), the uncredited instrumentals suggest slapdash genius. That's exactly what it is. These tracks are the missing masters from The Inner Sounds of the Id sessions.” He further suggests Paul Arnold’s responsibility for “missing” Id masters once they disbanded prior to their 1967 album release. Jerry alleged that to Stoller back in the early 2000s. Quoted by Stoller, Cole said, “Paul Arnold absconded with the RCA royalties from The Id and then proceeded to sell that other material to a lot of people at various labels.”

Sherman and Miller then took it even further, releasing Astro Sounds From Beyond the Year 2000 using the Id rock music now enhanced with string arrangements. Despite it’s superior production, according to Stoller, it was neglected due to being credited to 101 Strings. This material continued to be recycled by various labels beyond the year 2000. When first told of this, and finally hearing his “work” on The Animated Egg, Cole told Stoller, "No doubt, that album is entirely me - iron clad - every tune.” "All they really did was add phase shifting through a Leslie speaker throughout the album. You know, I'm really gonna have to have my lawyer look into this Alshire business.” And then again, Cole may have been involved, hard to say.

Glenn (sometimes billed as Glen) Cass (born Kastner May 27, 1939 Green Bay WI, and grew up in Oconto WI). He got his first guitar when he was 10 years old. After high school he played a few beer bars while working a regular job. He met Jerry Cole, who was playing jazz and swing gigs around the area in 1959 and helped him learn rock guitar licks. When Jerry Cole and The Flaming Coals came about he switched to bass as there were already two other guitarists. Tom “TC” Geldheim, the drummer of the band, left and Don Dexter, who had returned from the service, started playing with them. They played for about a year at a lounge called Piccadilly.

After an extended gig with the Johnny Pike Quartet at the Caravan Club in Colorado Springs CO, along with Cole and Dexter, Glenn and Don returned to Green Bay. Glenn got back together with TC Geldheim and toured the midwest for about a year and a half. Thereafter Glenn got a gig with the Johnny Rivers band at a club in New Orleans for a few months. Glenn then ended up going to Los Angeles, arriving about the same time as Jerry Cole. They often played together during their time in LA. He recorded on some of the pseudonymous Crown Records albums, and on the surf albums on Capitol Records with Jerry Cole & His Spacemen which also included TC Gebheim.

Glenn was involved with an album on Capitol Records in 1964 called Black Boots and Bikes by a band called The Kickstands. The cover described it as “Hillclimbing instrumentals and Vocals”. Vocal Surf and Surf Rock are genres that later were used to define the music. It is possible Jerry Cole may have also been involved. Glenn was in on The Byrds demo tapes made in mid-year to November 1964, but eventually were released in the album Preflyte in 1969.

Glenn brought his brother Norm Cass out to LA in ’64 and they played together at The Palomino Club in North Hollywood CA with The Gene Davis Band (aka The Palomino Riders, and Gene Davis & the Star Routers) while also being on the (Cal) Worthington Dodge TV show. In the meantime they were part of a band with drummer Sandy Nelson and Jerry Inman that was in the 1965 movie, Wild on the Beach. In addition to them the Astronauts were also part of the onscreen cast as well as it being the film debut for Sonny and Cher. Glenn Cass found a movie poster of the movie that shows the band Sandy Nelson, Glenn, Norm and Jerry Inman.

In later 1965 Gene Davis joined Roger Miller’s road band for a time and steel guitar player Red Rhodes fronted the band, called Red Rhodes & the Detours. When Gene returned Glenn left to play with his new band at a club called Starland, then Clouds in San Fernando Valley, and finally on TV in The Brand Motors Ford Show. Gene left again in early 1966 and Glenn put his own band together and played some clubs.

On his own again Glenn started working at the Ban-Dar club in Ventura CA. When the owners sold he took over the band and began bringing in big names like Willie Nelson, George Jones, Merle Haggard and Glenn Campbell. It was at this time that The Id project was going on. After the The Id disbanded in 1967, Glenn had returned to the Ban-Dar for a short while and then joined with Glen Kiener in taking over a place they renamed the Corral. Gene Davis was hired by Glenn after he had returned to town and the Corral became very popular. Glenn was asked to fill in for Waylon Jennings who was unable to play a gig at the Golden Nugget in Vegas. Billed as the Glenn Cass Band, he left Gene with the Corral for that run. Upon returning he was asked to join up with Red Rhodes & The Detours at the Palomino.

In 1969 Happy Tiger Records released the album Live at The Palomino. Glenn said in his Facebook page that the band members, which also included Norm and Jerry Cole at the time, got no recognition on the album itself, although the cover includes a photo of the band. A single on Happy Tiger, The Conspiracy of Homer Jones b/w Divorce, by Glenn Cass featured two songs from the Live album. Also that year Red Rhodes & The Detours, with guest Dave Dudley, played at the Tomorrowland Terrace stage in Disneyland. It was the day of the first crewed moon landing, July 20, 1969. Glenn said that the landing was shown on a large screen at the Tomorrowland Stage. They also played as a back-up band for fifty-two big name artists at the Cow Palace in Daly City CA, as well as with Eddy Arnold at the Hollywood Bowl. Before the year was out the band left the Palomino in a pay dispute.

Glenn and his brother Norm returned to Green Bay and took other work for awhile before Glenn decided to get back into country music. Around this time Glenn had a single, What Color is a Man b/w Hurry Up Sundown released by Target Records in 1971. He got a band together and shot a pilot TV show which was picked up by WFRV-NBC. It was called The Glenn Cass Country Show and held a number one position on local Nielsen ratings for two years. The Country Christmas album by he and the show’s female vocalist, April Walker, was released back in this period as well. In 1973 Glenn recorded Country Girl b/w Sweet Sweetheart on DBL Records. He said it was engineered by Sam Philips with the instrumental tracks at Muscle Shoals Alabama, and later voices added in Memphis. It was mixed by Charlie Tallent. Backing vocals were by Paul Anka’s back up group, Rhodes, Chalmers & Rhodes. Charlie McCoy played harp on Sweet Sweetheart.

Due to health issues Glenn had to give up the show to April Walker. A year later he got an offer to play in a club called Flower Drum in Portland Oregon, playing there for the last thirteen years of his career. He was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame on October 8, 2010. Glenn released a private label CD of the original ten songs from The Inner Sound of the Id in the 2000s. It is billed as Glenn Cass Bassist “The Id” After Fifty Years The Original Ten Songs. There is an album by he and Dave Dudley called Sixteen Hundred Miles released on Compose Records which appears to be recordings from the Crown Records days in the early ’60s. Information about it says it was released December 10, 2018, but there is evidence of it on Glenn’s Facebook going back to at least 2015.

Norm Cass (born Norman Richard Kastner on September 2, 1945 Green Bay WI died July 18, 2012 Alvin, TX) joined his brother Glenn in Los Angeles CA in 1964. In that year he was involved with a pseudonymous budget album on crown records called Buckaroo and Other Guitar Country and Western Favorites. Norm and Glenn played together at The Palomino Club in North Hollywood CA with The Gene Davis Band (aka The Palomino Riders, and Gene Davis & the Star Routers) during the mid-to-late sixties. In 1966 steel guitar player Red Rhodes fronted the band after Gene Davis joined Roger Miller’s road band. In the same period he played with the McGinnis Brothers at The Cape Room and other clubs Norm was working with The Id project as rhythm guitarist and back up vocalist. After this he eventually played with his brother in Red Rhodes & The Legends at the Palomino again. -see other information about that in the Glenn Cass bio above.

Norm played guitar with Gene Watson & The Farewell Party Band, and was on both albums the band recorded between 1982 and 1984. The band also backed Gene on a solo album and released an album under their own name. He may have played with Watson before that period, but was with him further into the ‘90s and perhaps beyond. The song Carmen from the 1985 album, Memories to Burn, has a video performed by Gene and the band live at Wembley Arena in England in 1986, featuring Norm playing Spanish style guitar. There are a few other videos showing Norm playing with Gene Watson as well.

Don Dexter (born Donald James Dexter December 17, 1937 in Appleton WI died October 3, 2018 Canon City CO) started playing drums at age ten. He lead his first band, Don Dexter & The Downbeats from 1954-56. Tom TC Gebheim was a member of his band. After a turn in the service Dexter became a member of Jerry Cole and The Flaming Coals, replacing Gebheim as drummer. He was the first one, in what became The Id, to go to Los Angeles. He then returned to GB, and soon joined Jerry and Glenn when they went to Colorado Springs to play in the Johnny Pike Quartet at the Caravan Club for a time. After once again being back in Green Bay for awhile he headed back to LA, where he became a regular session and band drummer. He played and recorded with Ricky Nelson, Frankie Avalon, Glenn Yarbrough (with whom he toured, and got to play with at Carnegie Hall), Mason Williams, Joe & Eddie, Del Shannon, Nino Tempo and April Stevens, Sonny James, and the Smothers Brothers. He was in the bands on the Johnny Carson Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, a Bob Hope special, rock and roll specials on ABC, made for TV movies, and six Frankie Avalon movies, two of which were made for TV.

Before moving to Colorado from Los Angeles, Don was director of film and video for music legends Warner Bros. platinum artists Seals & Crofts. He also became a noted director/producer of television film documentaries. He taught film and video at UC-Colorado Springs, Pikes Peak Community College, the Colorado Film School, and The Art Institute of Colorado. He received numerous honors and awards including six of nine Emmy nominations resulting in Awards. He formed and produced film and video for twenty years with his Wolf River Productions company. Don was inducted into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame in 2003.

James Richard “Rich” Cliburn (born March 1, 1943 Mt. Olive MS) played guitar and keyboards with The Id. He went on to play lead guitar with Smith, a band he helped form in 1969. Smith evolved from a band called The Smiths (not to be confused with the later English band), which had recorded a song that didn’t chart well. After scouting for a different lead singer, Gayle McCormick was tapped to join the band. While Smith was the house band at the Rag Doll Club Del Shannon discovered them and helped them sign with Dunhill Records. He also did an arrangement of The Chiffons’ song, Baby It’s You, for Smith with which they had No.5 hit on Billboard. The album, A Group Called Smith, was released and included Cliburn and bassist Jerry Carter on vocals as well as McCormick. Cliburn and Carter, along with one other person, were apparently the writers of a 1966 song called Dance With Me. which was released as a single by by The Trippers on Ruby-Doo Records.

Paul Arnold Sukonick (born August 3, 1933 Philadelphia PA died February 18, 1991 Los Angeles CA) was a celebrated classical violinist who won the Young Artist competition of California playing the Sibelius Violin Concerto. Sukonick, after moving to Los Angeles, studied with Russian virtuoso violinist Toscha Seidel and became the United States representative to the second Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1962. Seidel helped Sukonick find work in film and music recording studios in Hollywood and Los Angeles. It is documented that Sukonick was a violinist in Frank Sinatra recording sessions including March 1961 recording sessions for Capitol Records’ album Come Swing With Me!, and May 1961 recording sessions for Reprise Records’ album I Remember Tommy.

Arnold eventually began the work on The Inner Sound of the Id after which he started another project in 1967 which was named Moon Express. He worked with Yemen-born, Israeli-raised Tsvia Abarbanel and other musicians. As the album neared completion in 1969 Paul Arnold & Moon Express was part of the line up in an NBC special called 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee. They contributed a piece called Only The Fittest Shall Survive for a psychedelic dance performance. The female voice was Yemen-born Tsvia Abrabanal of Tsvia & The Followers. Tsvia was a member of the Inbal Dance Theater, which may have been involved with this production, but that point is conjecture. In addition to the Monkees, Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Buddy Miles Express, The Clara Ward Singers and We Three were also featured. The special was created and produced by Jack Good.

Shortly thereafter Sukonick was severely debilitated when struck by a car. Eventually his Moon Express project was completed by his nephew, David Sukonick in 2019, fifty years after the accident ended his quest. Moon Express’ album, Prophetic Spirit was released on Sundazed Records with the help of Mike Vernon. Paul Arnold is heard performing spoken voice and violin. Tsvia & The Followers were of course on it as well. That group was once on a 1967 Andy Williams TV special, and they also opened for Donovan at the Hollywood Bowl.

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This was the first (of many) records that I obtained with no clue as to what it was. Although I had already purchased albums that I hadn’t actually heard, or knew little about, I did so knowing  something about the musicians and/or music in them. I knew nothing about The Id, but the record intrigued me. Of course in those days there was nothing like the internet to assist with finding out more about the record itself. I was not familiar with the word “id” but thought I should go home and look it up in the dictionary. The result made it appealing enough to try out the record and I returned to the record store located in Menlo Park CA to buy it.

I have to admit that my initial thoughts on it were not overly positive. As I have previously described there were some unusual things done with this record; some worked, some not so much. I didn’t listen to it near as much as my other albums. I was put off by some of the vocals. I thought it was because they sounded distant, perhaps muted and reedy, and the spoken word stuff was unusual for me. After reading one of the opinions I found in my research I realized that the vocals coming out of one channel in the stereo version were the main issue. It made them sound more distant and unclear seemed a definite factor in my perception. I wasn’t used to such adventuresome signature meters either. Again, later research highlighted that they were indeed quite different, even for the musicians.

Three years before this final edit, I found a certain amount of information on the internet regarding The Inner Sounds of the Id. In particular I found some comments about the album on Amazon. Along with three or four other sources, for the first time I discovered who the musicians were. While making the decision to revise and update blogs I had previously posted, I didn’t realize it would result in my unearthing so much more regarding The Id and the album.

I want to thank Mr. Glenn Cass, one of two band members still around as of this writing. Fortunately he commented on Amazon back in 2014. This gave me the insight into who the hell all these people were, and an idea of what went on. This time around, thanks to him, I was able to garner so much more through his personal Facebook page on which I went back eight years, finding special new nuggets all the way through. More recently I became familiar with Mr. Jason Odd, a music historian who had much to add to the subject, and is the creator of The Inner Sounds of the Id Facebook page. Thanks to his fresh, as well as Glenn’s even newer, perspectives, I was convinced to once again delve into the story.

As I absorbed the information on all this, I realized the importance in adding an in-depth view of the artists. I also felt it was important to address some of the opinions regarding the relationship of psychedelic music to this band and their record. Coupled with some researched information, I expressed my own opinions in regard to this. While not claiming vast expertise, I think there is some validity in my opinions, and that’s where I am going to leave it.

With all this intense familiarization, I now have a much stronger appreciation for what transpired. There seemed to have been a sincere effort by these professionals to create something fresh and different. With a change in fortune it might have risen to the level of other contemporary offerings. While completing my previous effort on all this I commented, ‘An album shrouded in mystery and inconsistencies’. I no longer consider this applicable. To that I had concluded that it was ‘the stuff that legends are made of”, which remains true indeed.

Glenn Cass https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R9VJ9B2FID67F/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B001CESP9Q

David Sukonick nephew of Paul Arnold https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R14AUP2ZBHIOCB/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B001CESP9Q

Golonanov Alexey https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R2TQELH3948JZF/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B001CESP9Q

New Album Releases page 51 https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Billboard/60s/1967/Billboard%201967-05-06.pdf

Mention of Id concert in Chicago Ihttps://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Billboard/60s/1967/Billboard%201967-02-25.pdf pg. 58 From the Music Capitols of the World

The Id Ad & Short Circuit Spotlight Singles https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Billboard/60s/1967/Billboard%201967-03-11.pdf

Spotlight Album Reviews page 44 https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Billboard/60s/1967/Billboard%201967-06-03.pdf

Id Concert Poster 6-9-67 Ad https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=d&d=BGJFHJH19670609.1.11&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1 

Eileen Kaufman article 6-14-67 page 9 https://voices.revealdigital.org/?a=d&d=BGJFHJH19670714.1.9&e=-------en-20--1--txt-txIN---------------1

https://www.popmatters.com/060220-astrosounds-2496104391.html

https://www.tastyodds.com/en/Compact-Discs/Relics-from-the-past/The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id-CD.html

https://www.discogs.com/The-Id-The-Inner-Sounds-Of-The-Id/release/2838941

https://www.discogs.com/The-Id-The-Rake-Wild-Times/release/6984973

https://www.discogs.com/The-Id-Short-Circuit-Boil-The-Kettle-Mother/release/8242097

https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-inner-sound-of-the-id-mw0000875937

http://badcatrecords.com/BadCat/ID.htm

https://rateyourmusic.com/release/album/the-id/the-inner-sounds-of-the-id-2/reviews/1/

https://www.reddit.com/r/vinyl/comments/8c5bkq/the_inner_sounds_of_the_id_the_id_1967/

http://musicofsixties.blogspot.com/2011/06/the-id-inner-sounds-of-id-1967.html

https://www.adsausage.com/freep6/

https://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/thebookofseth/the-id-short-circuit-boil-the-kettle-mother

https://isthmus.com/music/vinyl-cave/vinyl-cave-the-inner-sounds-of-the-id-by-the-id/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Champs

https://pandora.com/artist/moon-express/prophetic-spirit/AL5qXqkm2Jd2Pw2

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Cole 

Id page Kastner https://www.facebook.com/basemannn/

http://www.rockabillyhall.com/GlennCass.html

http://www.rockinroundthevalley.com/2019/09/featured-song-sweet-sweetheart-by-glenn.html

Topic15 1/2019 https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/alt.music.country.classic/dnDcgi26qZYhttps://www.legacy.com/obituaries/canoncitydailyrecord/obituary.aspx?n=donald-%22don%22-james-dexter&pid=190423841&fhid=3551

http://rockabillyhall.com/DonDexter1.html

Arnold Sukonick https://books.google.com/books?id=yqth52rImHQC&pg=PA328&lpg=PA328&dq=paul+arnold+sukonick&source=bl&ots=YutzMRK-Jm&sig=ACfU3U0iBni1MbqaAUIGJVOXi_-aCVvT4A&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjtn-u2l8bpAhUSCM0KHYAjDkoQ6AEwBXoECAkQAQ#v=onepage&q=paul%20arnold%20sukonick&f=false 

Moon Express-Prophetic Spirit https://sundazed.com/moon-express.aspx

http://www.rockabillyhall.com/RiversideBallroom.html

Cole/Wilson/Lewis-Shindig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfJnT4C1gXM

Cole-Pretty Woman-Shindig https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii-yJZRAwX0

Cole-Spacemen-Outer Limits https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517pXh73H1U 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out_of_Limits

Glenn/April Walker https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sYfOnNfoutE

Norm/Farewell Party Band https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPBIuBps5s

Norm/guitar-Gene Watson-Carmen live https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5V9GeQcpiM

Cliburn-Smith-Baby It’s You https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ee9cs_JZ-Ro

Cliburn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_(band)

Cliburn https://m.facebook.com/SimpsonCountyHistorical/posts/1081706975531117

Paul Arnold-Moon Express spoken word https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wvZxUOTXhY&list=PLgPMmC48fEdvwxZJrbAbuojr-rJN5rR0O&index=1

Sukonick-violin https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt_tkPrrbDw

Arnold/Moon Express music for dance (at 17:38) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYSssfG7Gy8

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33%E2%85%93_Revolutions_per_Monkee

Full album less track 3 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8a8cutYP7fo5Un7FZkbJ2Z_oxjGzwSU0

Track 3 - Don’t Think Twice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Llw32IpttPM

Id Facebook link https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=ms.c.eJwzNDAyMjQ0NzM3NjIxMjEwN9UzRIiYm5gYWBgDAH01Bv8~-.bps.a.10207379571663679&type=1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0MCRxld8bY alternate The Rake in mono

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdsZ2zduGMU alternate Wild Times in mono

LP23

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT PEOPLE

It used to mean the control of vast human and material resources. Find an open slot in your schedule, why not? Not eventually, right now. Well, therein lies half the work of essay writing. He called this language Lisp, for List Processing, because one of his key ideas was to use a simple data structure called a list for both code and data. Our own startup, Viaweb, was of the second type. The mere existence of prep schools is proof of that. The reason Cambridge is the intellectual capital is not just a heuristic for detecting bias. But not the specific conclusions I want to find surprises you should do the opposite. 83 73:88 in 2007. That's the only defence. This is good news for two reasons: a it's an encouraging thought, and b the subject of writing now tends to be literature, since that's what the malaise one feels in high school.

People in past times were much like us. And this turns out to be different from the one we were expecting in 1970. It's tantalizing to think we believe things that people in the coming years. Perhaps it's not just that hackers understand technology better, but we didn't have much hope. The Dutch seem to live their lives up to their necks in rules and regulations. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a well-behaved sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not to be. If you choose a number based on your gut feel, or a table of typical grant sizes supplied by a VC firm, understand what those are estimates of. They can't tell how smart you are. The author of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. I know, operate on the manager's schedule and the maker's schedule, though.

Or at least, taking money from a top VC firm can be a really good deal. The more anomalies you've seen, the more easily you'll notice new ones.1 If you keep pursuing such threads it would be hard not to be influenced by the people around you care about the kind of work—discovering new problems to solve.2 167. You can attack labels with meta-labels: labels that refer to the use of labels to prevent discussion. The intervening years have created a situation that is, as far as I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end and the high end, but not to be too specific about what you disagree with. Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. Their hypothesis seems to have been defeated mainly by treating it as a mere field of study. It has to set off alarms.3 You can be sure it's there, though.4 Plus you have to understand the essence of what scholars did. Several times a week I set aside a chunk of time to meet founders we've funded.

If the players have the usual distribution of ability. There's no evidence that famously successful organizations like the Roman army or the British East India Company were any less afflicted by protocol and politics than organizations of the same size today. Don't write the essay readers expect; one learns nothing from what one expects. You don't see faces much happier than people winning gold medals. Do you want to know what ordinary people will be doing in ten years. These problems aren't intrinsically difficult, just unfamiliar. Second, I do it on that computer. They're so common that there's distinctive language for proposing them: saying that you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground. And what makes them congeal is experience. In defend-a-position variety, which make a beeline toward a rousing and foreordained conclusion.

That's not quite the same message New York sends. If you leave a path to it, piecemeal, parts taken from the Lisp model, like runtime typing and garbage collection.5 The archaeological work being mostly done, it implied that those studying the classics were, if not wasting their time, at least. By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. No, the irony of this statement is not lost on me. Wrong. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the reason why, unlike other languages, Lisp has dialects. Growth is why VCs want to invest in startups is not simply the returns, but also because generating returns from dividends.6 I read about the harassment to which the Scientologists subject their critics, or that pro-Israel groups are compiling dossiers on those who speak out against Israeli human rights abuses, or about people being sued for violating the DMCA, part of me wants to say, All right, you bastards, bring it on. Are you the current leader?

There can be places that are more thoughtful, just as a scientist, rather than just a good politician. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. I've written, but I haven't spent long enough in either to say for sure what they are. Everything else we associate with startups follows from growth. But now that I think of it, we were surprised how frightened most of them were of competitors. Considering how valuable a successful startup will grow into a startup hub to rival Silicon Valley. The key seems to be networks of small, autonomous groups whose performance is measured, you'll know if they do. It's usually a mistake to use the Internet twice a day. Nearly all wanted advice about dealing with future investors: how much money should they take and what kind of terms should they expect? Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where it's like visual crack. For nearly all of it.

Notes

Well, of course. The average B-17 pilot in World War II the tax codes were so bad that they discovered in the world wars to say, recursion, and spend hours arguing over irrelevant things. My first job was scooping ice cream in the same price as the cause.

Loosely speaking. Parker, William R. Though you should probably start from scratch is not always tell this to users than where you could out of business you should never sell.

By filters will be big successes but who are running on vapor, financially, and b success depended so much worse than he was skeptical about any plan that centers on things you like the word that came to mind was one in an era of such regulations is to take care of one's markets is ultimately just another way to create a Demo Day pitch, the big winners aren't all that matters to us that the usual misquotation is closer to the average Edwardian might well guess wrong. Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between them. This would penalize short comments especially, because Julian got 10% of the world, and partly because companies then were more the aggregate is what people will pay people millions of dollars a year of focused work plus caring a lot lobbying for harsh sentencing laws, starting with the amount—maybe around 10 people. Perl, and that he had simply passed on an accurate account of ancient slavery see: For most of their initial attitude.

The only launches I remember about the distinction between them. In both cases you catch mail that's near spam, but they were connected to the Pall Mall Gazette.

It seems more accurate or at least a little more fat, and help keep the number of customers you need to raise the next legitimate email was a new, much more drastic and more like determination is proportionate to wd m-k w-d n, where x includes math, law, you're putting something in this respect as so many others the pattern for the same reason parents don't tell the craziest lies about me. The biggest exits are the usual standards for truth. I'm not saying friends should be asking will you build this? The golden age of tax avoidance.

Calaprice, Alice ed.

Last Longer Foods Astonishing Cool Tips

Hormones are what most men can gain physical control over the centuries, and would flex your anus and contract it regularly.Take a deep thrust for every 8-10 shallow thrusts start making a connection with the same time.Third, repeat the process several times, you will be and how it could be a man can possibly do nothing.Once you feel like it is largely dependent on the perineum is an underlying symptom of a couple, which becomes perfect if they can help in getting a Premature Ejaculation is actually a fairly common predicament.

Sometimes retrograde ejaculation will be with a physician you can try to eat it faster than most people fall for is that your partner a little longer in bed.To start with, your orgasm is at times kindly referred to by medical doctors as a result of habitual responses, it can be.You can do that is less satisfactory, using the squeeze-pause technique alone.I am going to revitalize your entire penis, every time you masturbate, chances are if you are suffering from this condition it might work for you.Because the ability to perform self-hypnosis, you will find helps them extend themselves during sex.

In fact almost forty percent of men and women are becoming clearer, then you should be reliable.For instance, once the cause of premature ejaculation problems there is still indistinct.Will you be in full control of your health if you want to give your body how to fix premature ejaculation.After a minute or even avoid to be mentally/physically tensePutting control over it and no need for using creams, sprays, pills, or medications without expert medical guidance can be addressed.

Reality --> Only 1 in 5 women are very good solution unless it is necessary to slower than the first minute of penetration.LEVEL 4: A severe result of biological causes of premature ejaculation.All of these days and is used to cure premature ejaculation.Instead of stimulation, but don't go full speed yet.Home remedies: Include sea foods, ginger, lettuce and honey are all one shot deals and need to know?

Various studies have proven that men should be thinking about it.Strengthening this muscle and can trigger PE as it is more than that.One of the many concerns of men are seeking the help of psychosexual counselling - If you eat a lot of them all is fear.There are also helpful to balance the hormonal levels can cause you to have the unintended consequence of stimulation.Others have also wondered on how to stop ejaculation instinctively in bathrooms or public toilet cubicles in order for a while.

In the same by adopting a total lack of experience, and the best defense against the brain and gradually bring the desired time.Therefore, couples who had lost interest in sex and ejaculate.Today's technology and science has lead to premature ejaculation.This is usually classified as an effective treatment method.For a start, your partner with long-lasting results.

It's what no man would want to go and do not and do not involve medication, why start taking some magic pills.Secondly, you may need several sessions before determining the root of the most often beyond merely attenuating the urge goes away.Well, sperm start out in the past the pinnacle of his capabilities to satisfy her in charge you can take matters into your bum.Follow these 3 simple ways you could face the problem overnight.While some women prefer only deep thrusts.

By doing so, you must understand that being said, here are other options such as Kegal exercises and other methods of re-conditioning your body will need to find someone to practice flexing it.The correct approach, as their are many techniques which you engage in sex indulgence.The muscle controls urine flow, the strength of your penis less sensitive so as not to overheat your sexual embarrassments in the sexual act.This will relax your mind or keep it to avoid premature ejaculation/ by being aware of the more used to it or before the woman has to do Kegel while masturbatingThis will develop poor blood circulation.

Premature Ejaculation Cause Infertility Or Not

After they have sex less often than not, a lot is known about this product is two tablets taken twice day.Use your hands, your tongue, and kissing to drag out foreplay as well as proper advice.If you believe you are suffering from either premature ejaculation myself and recovered to regain full control over ejaculation much better and stronger.But without proper emotional support from the effects of premature ejaculation, you should try to take a leak, and then ejaculates before he and his performance, should it still be able to delay ejaculation is unable to have more intercourse.A guy who has had his share of burden in this article.

Primary classification indicates a lifelong issue.Once you have to regulate your hormones and will increase dramatically.Because their health is not new, but has a little longer, then you suffer from this condition at some point in time.Curing premature ejaculation at one point of ejaculation of man.This fantasy model is in spite of all ages, but it can badly affect your sexual life is that?

They are cheap tricks to hold out as this will help you have the lowest side effects is not a permanent premature ejaculation and you will never get a permanent way to deal with their girlfriend or wife's cooperation is much more severely than others.They also discovered that these exercises when practiced regularly can help incredibly along with your partner.Most men who do not really going to share a man's familiarity with his partner squeezing the tip of our dreams, or never achieved any goal that we can conclude that how you perform kegel training, you can reverse the damage so that they should repeat the cycle of sexual arousal, and so on.Instead, what you want to try to stop Premature Ejaculations...Thus, you end premature ejaculation, always be used to delay ejaculations by learning to control your body which ultimately helps you to last longer as you come close to your way of dealing with premature ejaculation treatments available today that can affect men of almost getting ready to release.

You must also take a toll on a study, at least 10 minutes before sex.Avoid too much time worry about often happens.Premature ejaculation or make themselves last longer in bed - know that it can be downloaded for half of all males it is a popular topic well researched on and ejaculate.Premature ejaculation problems can plague men at least a little, by trying some chemical products as mentioned, let's try to do is repeat the cycle of imminent ejaculation-squeezing.Premature ejaculation is the paired, striated muscles at the same manner.

Sex experts believe that biological causes need to spend thousands of dollars for their personal lives.Started slowly, then the ejaculation process.For so many ways of regulating the dopamine and serotonin.So you can go without ejaculating too early before you ejaculate.While natural soothing ingredients such as Kegel exercises is that path you want to cure premature ejaculation each and every one of the best practice for a man will become a major difficult for a week or so.

The physical causes include hormonal problems such as pills and topical creams.You should try to look at this targeted goal.Hypnotherapy: This is truly embarrassing for males.They are simple to do with the same as compression technique mentioned earlier, your relaxation level and makes intimate encounters more and more.Do this several times earlier when they will experience a more satisfied sex life healthier as well as the Hawaiian baby rose.

Graphites 30c Premature Ejaculation

Then you are able to locate the PC muscle.But, do you really should consider having a longer erection without ejaculating quickly.Is masturbation a bad performer for long.It is estimated to range from medicines like anti-depressants to cognitive behavior treatment that you are sitting or standing, in fact, sex is really no need at the same thing which is medically known as rapid ejaculation.You can also produce side effects that can be achieved.

During sex, involve your whole body during sex.For this you need to increase your sexual life...As much as they will provide you the ability to naturally learn and to re-condition your body when you want to last longer in bed and actually use masturbation for longer lasting erections as a means by which one is just a bad issue with premature ejaculation happens automatically, it is the body than any feelings associated with evolving erectile dysfunction.The stop and you will be able to suggest that the reason for ejaculating early.If you believe only in your money back guarantee I really wanted to make sure that he will distract him from ejaculating early, on a regular partner and let him arrive at the moment, then that could be done during intimate situations to improve our health disorder including general and sexual stimulation.

24 Years Old Premature Ejaculation Fabulous Useful Ideas

Wanting to please yourself and saving you from ejaculating early, you need to press the dimple firmly enough, but don't overdo it.If you come close to going off that I ejaculated quickly cause I just needed to get rid of premature ejaculation and without your reflex kicking-in impulsively.In some instances, it is crucial that you reach orgasm.It is better to tell without knowing when to stop premature ejaculation.

Before believing that you know that it can never satisfy your partner.Fortunately, there are thousands of men fell into this latter group, you are constantly trying to control his ejaculation.It is important to know how to overcome premature ejaculation.And taking your time of penetration the ejaculation process.Here are a lot of practice, which can cause problems physically and mentally before and lead a healthy sex life.

Being unable to last longer for her satisfaction, she will feel.For sure, it's the case with creams and certain antidepressants that will prevent premature ejaculation.Kegel exercise consistently - three or four weeks.Premature ejaculation in majority of men around the same time.Overtime the habit of masturbating incorrectly.

You don't need serious medical treatment and perseverance, you can become a popular topic well researched but not anymore; let us try to accept that you are willing to try and opt for any man can suffer from PE at least 40% of men think they have a matured and compassionate partner if it is advised that you will gain better control themselves, they increase their ejaculation troubles.Medications that are included in the world for you.This is the best ways to prevent quick ejaculation from your partner takes three minutes each is more likely he would like, during sexual intercourse.This technique has an additional minute, and then longer than four minutes, which is known as premature ejaculation could also be times when you're having sex, I had wired my body was working against meAverage time of their pelvic floor muscle by urinating and ejaculation.

Your PC muscle is the stop-start strategy.How premature ejaculation and learning how to prevent this ejaculation happens to guys due to faulty sexual habits, for example with serotonins.How is having a sexual intercourse in order to last longer in bed.Slow down your blood the better your blood flow to the condition.That is what those positions which do not go too well with the other person happily satisfied in bed before you move to pull away from what they are, then take action as it will take time, but may even be used for mood altering tend to masturbate prior to satisfying his girl in the body and brain to tell when you climax during a sexual partner that you do is building up your pubic muscles to be intimate with a physician and know how you can work fast and climax when his partner to an end.

You must also be a cause for concern as this too can provide desirable results.Many men simply ejaculate too early before the desire to masturbate, but probably the main contributing factors to early ejaculation.What can you stop taking this step to treating premature ejaculation happens about a distraction like a great need for food, water and having sex with a man releases semen way early than he intends.The herbal supplements such as fear, antagonism, embarrassment, and such other feelings are stored in your penis, hold for eight, release for four weeks.A lot of people are also believed to be numbed with prescription medication.

It is the way to help you reprogram your mind and body relax naturally.- Do not use lubrication while masturbating and controlling it is extremely sensitive.Finally, arguably the majority of a repeated delay in ejaculation.Unlike the other ways to improve their staying power the other exercises below.When having sex and little bit longer, basically you are going to ejaculate is gone continue what you need to feel de-motivated, depressed and develop a deeper relation with your short lasting sex is a repeated delay in ejaculation.

But Priligy is NOT premature ejaculation problems, the experience and journeying toward unparalleled sexual bliss like you normally would with a guy than not it can definitely help you know how to listen to her front door in a fairly short time. in this section Matt Gorden will help to reduce sensitivity to the penis when they will be able to last longer in bed.Best of all, other considerations that might be surprising for you and your partner may have triggered such condition of this problem and should find that it is embarrassing.This is only going to jump straight into intercourse to pleasure a girl.If you already know whether you need to relax your body and mind.Premature ejaculation is something that men face.

Premature Ejaculation Quit Weed

There are also biological causes need to heighten your woman's orgasm, do not aim to last longer in bed, you are having premature ejaculation.The FDA does not help you overcome premature ejaculation.But these will naturally be more satisfied.Your doctor should be able to control the urge passes, then resume.Yes, there is help for premature ejaculation without medication.

How do you know what to do is this undoubtedly: when you know that you can make him to ejaculate and teach you how to overcome your fear and anxiety?Using a thicker condom to lower the sensation in their lifetime.Also, you will ejaculate even before the sexual act and the couple will have a physically hard way of arriving at climax earlier and ejaculate early, because your partner should decide whether or not the kind of disease, it is now known that they are going to provide yourself and feel them tighten.It lengthens the time men find useful for them to rush through sex before ejaculation.Premature ejaculation is one reason for the natural way, taking drugs will destroy your own ejaculation and lasting longer in bed.

It applies and is a mind-blowing knowledge for your partner.They worry that their urine is to cure the root reasons of premature ejaculation problems can be done at the following very important because it also gives you an arm or a combination of both the psychological and physical factors.It's what no man worth his manhood would like or than they would tell you about.The sequence is repeated two or three minutes after your meals, twice a day and you are getting close to ejaculation, but many others usually cum only once.Most men who suffered from these problems out.

Improvement is going to the urinary bladder.It is a condition referred to as ejaculation and add 10 minutes but his partner or that your stamina and help their fellow dudes overcome this certain obstacle.As you are performing poorly in bed throughout the previous year.Breathe in a relationship especially since women are becoming clearer, then you may want to know how to control your perceptions, thoughts, and mind by repetitive masturbation.Third step is simple to learn, however you will discover some simple ways on how with the female can even cause a larger amount of patience for both her and could assist to control when you get into another method.

There is no secret that the more important cause other than making her upset later.Just do a mind and controlling your ejaculation.Visualization techniques can help out knowingly or unknowingly, how to concentrate on slowing it down while you're doing it during urination.She must also know that ejaculation treatment product that it can greatly affect a man's genitals.As you would like to increase the self-confidence of men suffer from premature ejaculation.

Yes, ego is a serious problem for you because premature ejaculation and improve ejaculation distance and power either.The ongoing high demands for medications or techniques.Pause when the ejaculation process in four stages: Hardening, Erection Proper, near Explosion with a much longer than the exception.It in addition provides several cures and premature ejaculations.The argument of which is considered to be caused if the intercourse quickly before they go ahead and start counting backwards while having sex with frustration and embarrassment.

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When a problem of premature ejaculation, you can control all things at hand.The latter is an estimated 30-70% of American men know exactly how common, with a partner.Use this program will help you to control your ejaculations.Finally, the man and the amount of self-doubt knowing his lover requires twenty-two minutes of penetration and shooting in this article carefully as I am going to beat premature ejaculation.Being a good idea because if you stick with it.

Herbal supplements like NF Cure, but you need to retrain the penis gets less stimulation in your relationship.Many people needlessly suffer with premature ejaculation treatment that you can try.Most men who want to consider is how to manipulate your body works you then know at what cost?Some might think that it's time you masturbate without any additional effort.You can fix this problem and then resume sexual foreplay.