Maelstrom, Part VI: Domination

Continued from:

Maelstrom, Part V: Nemesis (posted June 2, 2012)

It seems that many things have coincided to divert my attention, heart, and soul back to Bowling Green. To the unresolved conflict I have long since dubbed the Maelstrom.

A few more friends from BGSU have been lost. Still more drift a little farther every day.

Yeah, I get it. You went on to get your doctorate, and became too good for old friends like me who said “enough is enough” with a bullshit Master’s degree. And now, you have become part of the system, part of the problem. But when the bottom falls out, and you realize you can’t get a job IN the vacuum you’ve dedicated your life to living inside, what next? Will you realize that the pyramid scheme of academia is unsustainable?

There are other things prompting this post.

I unexpectedly got into an online tiff with some random guy who is a current student at BGSU. His rebuttal to my post was ignorant, condescending, and worst of all, cliché. The gloves came off after that. You’d think I’d be long free from the shackles of academia, but I never know when the fight is going to find me again. Some of you have wrongly criticized me for “dwelling on the past,” when in fact it is a conflict in the present. The fuckers won’t leave me alone.

And every time I get a bill from Fed Loans, I want to do that much monetary-equivalent damage to the College of Musical Arts. It’s not over until I am out of a debt I never should have been naïve enough to enter into in the first place. So, the next time you think about telling me to let go of the past, go fuck yourself. Every bill is a slap in the face. Every BG Alumni magazine that somehow follows me around every time I change addresses is also a slap in the face. Not to mention my Facebook feed.

This is just a side note, but I also happen to be reading the Star Wars: New Jedi Order series for the third (or is it the fourth?) time. The only reason I mention it is because it has become intrinsically connected to BGSU for me, in both good and bad ways. The conflict spans nineteen books, which took me all of my second year to gradually steal bits of time here and there in order to read it. My first month as a free man, after moving back to Missouri, I finished the final book in the series, symbolically giving closure to my grad school experience. The Yuuzhan Vong invasion saga is dark and epic, like my experience with BGSU. The two will always be intertwined for me.

I remember those midnight runs on the track around the pond in front of the Moore Musical Arts Center. Even in the rain, I would run, to burn off some of that aggression. I would run until I couldn’t. When the clouds would take on a reddish-brown hue from some of the city lights below, I would pretend the color was instead a harbinger of imminent volcanic doom, that fire and death would rain down at any minute.

Whenever I watch the climactic duel on Mustafar, I root for Darth Vader.

I have gotten back into the martial arts after a disgraceful dry spell, preparing for a return visit to Kansas City, both for South KC Shotokan Karate and for some MMA sparring with an old wingman. As part of my regimen, I am also doing weapon drills and kata in the backyard at night, training until I can’t feel feelings anymore.

Bring me a storm.

I recently had an unexpected and absolutely illuminating conversation with someone from BGSU, a glimpse into the inner workings of the faculty during my time there, into the interpersonal strife beneath the veneer. It was beyond intriguing--it was a revelation. And yet, none of this new knowledge comes as a surprise to me, to discover that I had Dr. Shrude pegged more accurately than I could have imagined. She is a petty, egotistical, insecure, jealous, power-hungry cunt, and I will not hold back.

Granted, that’s not news to me. I knew all this a long time ago. But somehow, hearing it come from someone else, who was on the other side of the proverbial table, makes me feel… vindicated, energized, and galvanized. And I feel even more contemptuous to the percentage of my friends who were blind to her ways, who (ostensibly, at least) had a positive experience and look back on BGSU with something resembling fondness. I want to grab those people by the shoulders and shake them really hard. Anyone who, in my presence, speaks of Marilyn Shrude in any way that resembles fondness or respect is going to get a splash of cold water to the face, a blunt dose of hard reality. I resolve to be even more belligerent from now on, if you can imagine such a thing.

The whole program is rotten to the core, and all the wrong people are controlling and territorial. (That’s academia for you. That goes for everywhere else, too.) And Burton Beerman may have retired, but I haven’t fucking finished with him yet.

It has been ten years since I first arrived in Bowling Green, Ohio, and eight years since departing from it. Throughout those eight years, I have had plenty to say, but even after all this time, I have not yet BEGUN to fight.

On that note, I’m following Mittens on Twitter @Real_Mittens. And on SoundCloud. 

My alter ego Mittens’ next opus will probably be a multi-movement work I outlined while I had too much time on my hands as a night watchman, exactly the time of the blog post Maelstrom, Part V: Nemesis.

When I close my eyes, I can hear the bells tolling for the Church of New Music, a cacophony of mindless textures and saxophone extended technique. At my old job, as I was researching and listening, listening and researching, what began as a small piece to imitate the music I couldn’t get out of my head grew into more movements. Five, six, eight. Ten. Sixteen. The final outline of the work is sixteen movements. I was meticulous in my outline, charting which pieces each movement are modeled after, which pieces fit best with which titled movement, and how they would give shape to the overall composition (that probably no one will ever want to hear). I culled the list from works from the Big Four, obviously—the composition faculty from my time, Beerman, Lillios, Shrude, Kuehn—but also from the likes of Ligeti, Feldman, Wolff, Babbitt, and a few others who I won’t mention because they might not make the final cut.

The first movement, though, Repressive Voices, uses real audio of various people from BGSU talking about the program itself, which I gathered over time. What starts out as quotes taken out of context evolves cleverly into a rearrangement of the words to have them say what I think they should be saying, to more accurately depict the true nature of the program. I don’t have it completed yet, but the script is brilliant, if I say so myself.

Why do it? What’s the point? What’s the point of studying music I hate to imitate it out of spite?

I think you just answered your own question. Spite.

Also, because of the title itself: Unfinished Fever Dreams. Maybe by doing this, it will be out of my system and I can finally have peace and quiet. Because these thoughts spiral around like a fever dream that never finishes.

That, and because once it’s online for the whole world to see, it will be a clear “fuck you” that will hopefully garner some hateful comments on YouTube. That is my endgame with this piece, as with most of Mittens’ other works: to troll BGSU and everyone like them. It is essentially a musical hate letter to Bowling Green State University. And it will be done someday.

Unfinished Fever Dreams

I. Repressive Voices

II. Arrogant Escapades

III. Antagonistic Impulses

IV. Sophistic Trances

V. Pedantic Episodes

VI. Didactic Verses

VII. Stochastic Pontifications

VIII. Iconoclastic Interludes

IX. Pretentious Images

X. Intransigent Expectations

XI. Narcissistic Interpolations

XII. Declamatory Interruptions

XIII. Solipsistic Diatribes

XIV. Syllogistic Afterthoughts

XV. Masochistic Variations

XVI. Regressive Outbursts

While I’m divulging outlines and prospective titles, I might as well come back to an idea I talked about in Maelstrom, Part V: Nemesis. I revealed designs for a symphonic tone poem in twenty movements. In part, it was to be an extrapolation of material from throughout the numerous drafts of my Master’s thesis, Volition.

In the post, I said:

“And each movement title is a poetic phrase depicting the apocalyptic destruction wrought by a ‘dark figure’ (me) descending from the sky. Each movement is also written in satirically pretentious lower-case letters, because I HATE pieces that are titled using only lower-case letters.”

Well, since I’ll probably never actually write it, I will just leave the project to its current outline of “temp tracks” of film music. That means now is as good a time as any to just go ahead and post the list of movements:

The Destruction of Bowling Green, Ohio

I. the approaching storm

II. a dark figure appears among ashen clouds

III. ominous calm… and the reckoning begins

IV. a cacophony of voices crying out in terror

V. havoc – unthinking, unyielding

VI. through rain and smoke, the dark figure marches nearer, with intent

VII. unnatural storm, the charcoal sky turns red

VIII. a tempest of lightning and raining fire

IX. the great clock tower crumbles

X. the windmills collapse

XI. and abyssal fissures rip open the earth

XII. Moore Musical Arts Center, the ultimate quarry

XIII. the dark figure reveals his face to his enemies

XIV. telekinetic massacre – fury unleashed

XV. a weapon forged from hate and will

XVI. violence, both flawless in form and merciless in execution

XVII. immolation

XVIII. adagio and annihilation

XIX. final obliteration

XX. and after, a desolate landscape of ruin

All of this is how much I hate Bowling Green State University.

I suppose the next step is to finally write that letter of grievances to the dean of the College of Musical Arts… The problem is, I still don’t know what to say, or even what I hope to gain from it other than a much-needed, long-overdue sense of catharsis. But that’s reason enough. Maybe that should be the subject of Maelstrom, Part VII.

In all seriousness, though... I am open to input. Near the end of my time in Ohio, I was sitting at Panera for some one-on-one with a friend of mine, the associate pastor of the church I had been attending regularly at the time. Jon Cavanaugh was his name, and I think he was 31 at the time—only a handful of years my superior. Cool guy, down-to-earth, wish I could find him on Facebook. He had relatives in Overland Park, KS, where I found myself living less than two years later, but I digress. He urged me to air these grievances with the dean of the College of Musical Arts, for the sake of closure, catharsis, spiritual well-being. At the time, I scoffed at the suggestion, although part of me knew I wanted to oblige. Ever since then, I realized I should have done exactly that. But how? Fucking how?! Without missing a beat, he bestowed upon me what was, in retrospect, one of the most sage bits of advice I ever received, but have yet to follow up on. How should I proceed?

That is the next phase. I really, truly have nothing to lose, after all.

In the angry words of Optimus Prime, “I’m coming for you!”