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poorquentyn · 6 years ago

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Remember Your Name, Part 3: When That Other Man Had Come This Way

Series so far here

“That era has passed. Nothing that belonged to it exists anymore.”

At the end of In the Mood for Love, the film’s protagonist visits the ruins of Angkor Wat. He’d earlier mused to a friend about how back in the day, if you had a secret burning inside that you couldn’t bring yourself to share, you dug a shallow hole into a tree and whispered your secret into it, filling the hole with mud afterwards to keep the truth at bay.

But when our hero decides to try and leave behind the story of forsaken love we saw unfold over the course of the movie, he does not seek out a living thing that can survive and change and grow. He instead unburdens himself to a ruin: a monument to the ravages wrought and distances forged by time. In the sequel 2046, he disappears into the rose-colored fog within, surrounded by his ghosts on parade. Try as he might, he could not seal them away forever.

I have come this way before. It was a dangerous thought, and he regretted it at once.

“No,” he said, “no, that was some other man, that was before you knew your name.” His name was Reek. He had to remember that. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leek. When that other man had come this way, an army had followed close behind him, the great host of the north riding to war beneath the grey-and-white banners of House Stark. Reek rode alone, clutching a peace banner on a pinewood staff. When that other man had come this way, he had been mounted on a courser, swift and spirited. Reek rode a broken-down stot, all skin and bone and ribs, and he rode her slowly for fear he might fall off. The other man had been a good rider, but Reek was uneasy on horseback. It had been so long. He was no rider. He was not even a man. He was Lord Ramsay’s creature, lower than a dog, a worm in human skin. “You will pretend to be a prince,” Lord Ramsay told him last night, as Reek was soaking in a tub of scalding water, “but we know the truth. You’re Reek. You’ll always be Reek, no matter how sweet you smell. Your nose may lie to you. Remember your name. Remember who you are.”

“Reek,” he said. “Your Reek.”

The Drunkard’s Tower leaned as if it were about to collapse, just as it had for half a thousand years. The Children’s Tower thrust into the sky as straight as a spear, but its shattered top was open to the wind and rain. The Gatehouse Tower, squat and wide, was the largest of the three, slimy with moss, a gnarled tree growing sideways from the stones of its north side, fragments of broken wall still standing to the east and west. The Karstarks took the Drunkard’s Tower and the Umbers the Children’s Tower, he recalled. Robb claimed the Gatehouse Tower for his own. If he closed his eyes, he could see the banners in his mind’s eye, snapping bravely in a brisk north wind. All gone now, all fallen.

Memory and identity are inextricable. Who you were informs who you are, and who you are invariably filters your perspective on who you were. The weight of backstory has always been one of ASOIAF’s central claims to profundity. R+L=J, the story’s central revelation and the beating heart of the fandom, is also the burdensome duty that defined our fakeout protagonist Eddard Stark. What makes Ned’s life so meaningful is that he put it all on the line not to keep the secret that his purported bastard Jon is in fact his sister Lyanna’s son by Rhaegar Targaryen, but in the name of the values that keeping that secret instilled in him.

Time was perilously short. The king would return from his hunt soon, and honor would require Ned to go to him with all he had learned. Vayon Poole had arranged for Sansa and Arya to sail on the Wind Witch out of Braavos, three days hence. They would be back at Winterfell before the harvest. Ned could no longer use his concern for their safety to excuse his delay.

Yet last night he had dreamt of Rhaegar's children. Lord Tywin had laid the bodies beneath the Iron Throne, wrapped in the crimson cloaks of his house guard. That was clever of him; the blood did not show so badly against the red cloth. The little princess had been barefoot, still dressed in her bed gown, and the boy…the boy…

Ned could not let that happen again. The realm could not withstand a second mad king, another dance of blood and vengeance. He must find some way to save the children.

Jaime floats in heat and memory in the Harrenhal bathtubs, the truth finally swimming to the surface; Barbrey stares deep into a dead man’s face, the pleasure and pain of it eternally intermingled; Robert himself admits that all he wants most is to leave behind the crown it was all ostensibly for. They all sing the same sad song, the one Reek sings as he rides fearfully into Theon Greyjoy’s past at Moat Cailin: I tried to grasp a star, overreached, and fell. They followed the red comet, over the edge. Their songs broke, and broke them in their fall.

Following on Theon briefly coming unstuck in time in his first ADWD chapter, Reek II builds on that disorientation by externalizing it onto his environment. The chapter is thick with memory and riddled with decay, all swathes of mist that give way to fountains of blood, because that’s what the inside of Theon Greyjoy’s head looks like. That opening chapter in the Dreadfort gave us a blood-curdling glimpse of the crucible in which Theon became Reek before forcing him out of it; now, the story goes widescreen, taking in how the North has changed along with our POV since last he stepped out into it.

The hall was dark stone, high ceilinged and drafty, full of drifting smoke, its stone walls spotted by huge patches of pale lichen. A peat fire burned low in a hearth blackened by the hotter blazes of years past. A massive table of carved stone filled the chamber, as it had for centuries. There was where I sat, the last time I was here, he remembered. Robb was at the head of the table, with the Greatjon to his right and Roose Bolton on his left. The Glovers sat next to Helman Tallhart. Karstark and his sons were across from them.

The reference to time’s fire in which we burn (“blackened by the hotter blazes of years past”), the epochal weight of the table filling the chamber “as it had for centuries,” the evocation of the ghosts that haunt Theon--all of it grounds the business of the plot in memory and time, and thus in what’s happened to our POV.

Theon smiled. Reek cannot. Theon had friends. Reek is a pariah. Theon came to Moat Cailin with an army. Now, that army is dead and gone, except for those who turned on the rest...just as he did. Moat Cailin has been made a ruin all over again, defeat and despair folded into it like Lannister crimson into Stark steel, a testament like Tristifer’s tomb to a shattered kingdom. Theon helped shatter it, and now he stumbles back shattered to help melt down what’s left. He is Moat Cailin, more or less, the broken towers a misty mirror for our broken man, the splintered teeth of his smile writ large. The fog that cloaks the fortress reflects how he’s been forced to compartmentalize his past, which is now screaming its way to the surface. There are ghosts in Moat Cailin, and he is one of them.

(image by warsandpoliticsoficeandfire.wordpress.com)

This sense of desolation and loss is mirrored in the chapter’s purpose in the larger plot. The standoff between the Boltons and the Ironborn over the Moat (and by extension, the North as a whole) is little more than a feast for crows. Both sides went for the direwolf’s throat with no higher cause than plunder and the pleasure of it; all they’re fighting over is who did it more successfully. The Ironborn here were left to rot by their Lord Captain when he went chasing his brother’s crown...

“Victarion commanded us to hold, he did. I heard him with my own ears. Hold here till I return, he told Kenning.”

“Aye,” said the one-armed man. “That’s what he said. The kingsmoot called, but he swore that he’d be back, with a driftwood crown upon his head and a thousand men behind him.”

“My uncle is never coming back,” Reek told them. “The kingsmoot crowned his brother Euron, and the Crow’s Eye has other wars to fight. You think my uncle values you? He doesn’t. You are the ones he left behind to die. He scraped you off the same way he scrapes mud off his boots when he wades ashore.”

Those words struck home. He could see it in their eyes, in the way they looked at one another or frowned above their cups. They all feared they’d been abandoned, but it took me to turn fear into certainty. These were not the kin of famous captains nor the blood of the great Houses of the Iron Islands. These were the sons of thralls and salt wives.

...and the Dreadfort men can’t lay any credible claim to be acting as defenders of the North from the reaving invaders, given the Northern blood they’ve both happily spilled throughout. (Those who hunt people for sport shouldn’t throw stones, and all that.) Ramsay in this chapter is merely mopping up after and reaping the benefits of the hard-earned victory won by Howland Reed and his guerilla fighters, and even that he’s not doing himself, but forcing a helpless tortured prisoner to do for him. The Bastard’s unspeakably hideous treatment of the Ironborn after they surrender to him in good faith is the punchline to a very dark joke, poisoned icing on bitter cake. And of course, it’s all in the service of welcoming an army soaked in the blood of the men and women with whom they sat down to dinner, as allies, as friends, as guests at a wedding.

Three days later, the vanguard of Roose Bolton’s host threaded its way through the ruins and past the row of grisly sentinels—four hundred mounted Freys clad in blue and grey, their spearpoints glittering whenever the sun broke through the clouds. Two of old Lord Walder’s sons led the van. One was brawny, with a massive jut of jaw and arms thick with muscle. The other had hungry eyes close-set above a pointed nose, a thin brown beard that did not quite conceal the weak chin beneath it, a bald head. Hosteen and Aenys. He remembered them from before he knew his name. Hosteen was a bull, slow to anger but implacable once roused, and by repute the fiercest fighter of Lord Walder’s get. Aenys was older, crueler, and more clever—a commander, not a swordsman. Both were seasoned soldiers.

The northmen followed hard behind the van, their tattered banners streaming in the wind. Reek watched them pass. Most were afoot, and there were so few of them. He remembered the great host that marched south with Young Wolf, beneath the direwolf of Winterfell. Twenty thousand swords and spears had gone off to war with Robb, or near enough to make no matter, but only two in ten were coming back, and most of those were Dreadfort men.

Even as Reek struggles to keep Theon at bay (thinking of his life before the Dreadfort dungeons as the time “before he knew his name”), making contact with the people with whom Theon rode to war is stirring something inside him, and that’s reflected in the big picture of what it means for this army to arrive in the North. Grey Wind’s forlorn eyes from the House of the Undying are watching, and judging, and waiting. Wolves prowl and howl through the opening chapters of ADWD’s Northern half, singing the song of their fall, and of Jojen’s solemn promise: “the wolves will come again.” The ghosts of the Red Wedding follow this army to Winterfell, and hang heavy on the Ramsay-Jeyne wedding and everything that follows, crying out for redress. The gods have been insulted, and will have their due. Thankfully, there’s a man going ‘round taking names, and he decides who to free and who to blame...

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...but discussion of His Grace King Stannis Baratheon, the Wrath of God, will have to wait for later chapters, as will Wyman Manderly’s culinary interpretation of divine judgment.

For the purposes of Theon’s arc, the Ironborn at Moat Cailin serve as the mirror from which he’s trying so desperately to look away. I said last time that what Reek fears most right now, even more than Ramsay, is being Theon. That name carries so much shame and pain with it that he prefers to be “your Reek,” fearing not only the external consequences of defiance (more torture and maiming), but also the internal consequences of identifying as his old self. All Theon wanted to do in ACOK was take control of his life, and now that’s the last thing he wants, because of what he did with that power once he had it. He returns to Moat Cailin flying a white flag of peace, but it may as well be one of surrender.

“I am Ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been Ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak.

“Ralf Kenning is dead,” he said. “Who commands here?”

The drinkers stared at him blankly. One laughed. Another spat. Finally one of the Codds said, “Who asks?”

“Lord Balon’s son.” Reek, my name is Reek, it rhymes with cheek.

One of the Codds pushed to his feet. A big man, but pop-eyed and wide of mouth, with dead white flesh. He looked as if his father had sired him on a fish, but he still wore a longsword. “Dagon Codd yields to no man.”

No, please, you have to listen. The thought of what Ramsay would do to him if he crept back to camp without the garrison’s surrender was almost enough to make him piss his breeches. Reek, Reek, it rhymes with leak.

What gives this chapter its charge is that our POV is being forced by the man who shattered his old identity to resume that identity. It’s Theon playing Reek playing Theon, and he’s being made to remember his name in order to sway the people who represent his old life, because they’d never surrender to Reek. He knows that, because he used to be like them...or he wanted to be, anyway. When Theon first became a POV, his mind was aflame with song, lashing his in-between identity to the values and visions of the Old Way:

Once I would have kept her as a salt wife in truth, he thought to himself as he slid his fingers through her tangled hair. Once. When we still kept the Old Way, lived by the axe instead of the pick, taking what we would, be it wealth, women, or glory. In those days, the Ironborn did not work mines; that was labor for the captives brought back from the hostings, and so too the sorry business of farming and tending goats and sheep. War was an ironman's proper trade. The Drowned God had made them to reave and rape, to carve out kingdoms and write their names in fire and blood and song.

Aegon the Dragon had destroyed the Old Way when he burned Black Harren, gave Harren's kingdom back to the weakling rivermen, and reduced the Iron Islands to an insignificant backwater of a much greater realm. Yet the old red tales were still told around driftwood fires and smoky hearths all across the islands, even behind the high stone halls of Pyke. Theon's father numbered among his titles the style of Lord Reaper, and the Greyjoy words boasted that We Do Not Sow.

It had been to bring back the Old Way more than for the empty vanity of a crown that Lord Balon had staged his great rebellion. Robert Baratheon had written a bloody end to that hope, with the help of his friend Eddard Stark, but both men were dead now. Mere boys ruled in their stead, and the realm that Aegon the Conqueror had forged was smashed and sundered. This is the season, Theon thought as the captain's daughter slid her lips up and down the length of him, the season, the year, the day, and I am the man.

This chapter, Theon I ACOK, slots right in between Davos I (the one with Lightbringer) and Daenerys I (the one in the Red Waste), both of them positively soaked with messianic imagery and focused on weighty questions of power, prophecy, and the price you pay. But in Theon’s chapter, the launching pad for the most stubbornly secular storyline in ACOK, the messianic mindset is stripped of its finery and exposed as pitiful self-delusion. This is who you are, Chosen One, all the more clearly with neither dragons nor shadowbinders at your back: a mirror-drunk fool dreaming of atrocities while your dick gets sucked.

Three books later, that self-image has been racked and flayed and castrated before being spat back out at us as Reek. He thinks of himself as having been born beneath the Dreadfort, molded like clay from Theon’s blood and pain; are you my mother, Ramsay? He keeps retreating to his new name in his thoughts, a mantra to keep the fear away. The identity of which he dreamed is now the nightmare he cannot shake. And what better way for the author to reflect that than by bringing him up against the death of his dream, the most unshakable images of the rot eating away at the Old Way?

Reek passed the rotted carcass of a horse, an arrow jutting from its neck. A long white snake slithered into its empty eye socket at his approach. Behind the horse he spied the rider, or what remained of him. The crows had stripped the flesh from the man’s face, and a feral dog had burrowed beneath his mail to get at his entrails. Farther on, another corpse had sunk so deep into the muck that only his face and fingers showed.

Closer to the towers, corpses littered the ground on every side. Blood-blooms had sprouted from their gaping wounds, pale flowers with petals plump and moist as a woman’s lips.

Ralf Kenning lay shivering beneath a mountain of furs. His arms were stacked beside him—sword and axe, mail hauberk, iron warhelm. His shield bore the storm god’s cloudy hand, lightning crackling from his fingers down to a raging sea, but the paint was discolored and peeling, the wood beneath starting to rot.

Ralf was rotting too. Beneath the furs he was naked and feverish, his pale puffy flesh covered with weeping sores and scabs. His head was misshapen, one cheek grotesquely swollen, his neck so engorged with blood that it threatened to swallow his face. The arm on that same side was big as a log and crawling with white worms. No one had bathed him or shaved him for many days, from the look of him. One eye wept pus, and his beard was crusty with dried vomit.

“What happened to him?” asked Reek.

“He was on the parapets and some bog devil loosed an arrow at him. It was only a graze, but…they poison their shafts, smear the points with shit and worse things. We poured boiling wine into the wound, but it made no difference.”

This is how the Old Way has always died, with broken towers and the stench of corpses, from Aegon melting Harrenhal to Robert smashing Pyke. Every time it falls, the seeds are sown for its next rise; the ideology’s exposed festering folly is folded into a Lost Cause mythos that weaponizes resentment and ennobles suffering. The last time it fell, part of the price paid was Theon’s identity, and his desperate drive to reclaim it by reviving the Old Way is what led him here. He’s unrecognizable to the very world in which he hoped to finally recognize himself.

The garrison will never know me. Some might recall the boy he’d been before he learned his name, but Reek would be a stranger to them. It had been a long while since he last looked into a glass, but he knew how old he must appear. His hair had turned white; much of it had fallen out, and what was left was stiff and dry as straw. The dungeons had left him weak as an old woman and so thin a strong wind could knock him down.

And his hands…Ramsay had given him gloves, fine gloves of black leather, soft and supple, stuffed with wool to conceal his missing fingers, but if anyone looked closely, he would see that three of his fingers did not bend.

That fall from grace, the violent collapse of his projected identity, is reflected back at him by the sorry state of the Ironborn garrison. They came here as an army, together, one people; they knew who they were. And now...?

Someone seized him and dragged him inside, and he heard the door crash shut behind him. He was pulled to his feet and shoved against a wall. Then a knife was at his throat, a bearded face so close to his that he could count the man’s nose hairs. “Who are you? What’s your purpose here? Quick now, or I’ll do you the same as him.” The guard jerked his head toward a body rotting on the floor beside the door, its flesh green and crawling with maggots.

“I am ironborn,” Reek answered, lying. The boy he’d been before had been ironborn, true enough, but Reek had come into this world in the dungeons of the Dreadfort. “Look at my face. I am Lord Balon’s son. Your prince.” He would have said the name, but somehow the words caught in his throat. Reek, I’m Reek, it rhymes with squeak. He had to forget that for a little while, though. No man would ever yield to a creature such as Reek, no matter how desperate his situation. He must pretend to be a prince again.

His captor stared at his face, squinting, his mouth twisted in suspicion. His teeth were brown, and his breath stank of ale and onion. “Lord Balon’s sons were killed.”

“My brothers. Not me. Lord Ramsay took me captive after Winterfell. He’s sent me here to treat with you. Do you command here?”

“Me?” The man lowered his knife and took a step backwards, almost stumbling over the corpse. “Not me, m’lord.” His mail was rusted, his leathers rotting. On the back of one hand an open sore wept blood. “Ralf Kenning has the command. The captain said. I’m on the door, is all.”

“And who is this?” Reek gave the corpse a kick.

The guard stared at the dead man as if seeing him for the first time. “Him…he drank the water. I had to cut his throat for him, to stop his screaming. Bad belly. You can’t drink the water. That’s why we got the ale.” The guard rubbed his face, his eyes red and inflamed. “We used to drag the dead down into the cellars. All the vaults are flooded down there. No one wants to take the trouble now, so we just leave them where they fall.”

“The cellar is a better place for them. Give them to the water. To the Drowned God.”

The man laughed. “No gods down there, m’lord. Only rats and water snakes. White things, thick as your leg. Sometimes they slither up the steps and bite you in your sleep.”

Reek remembered the dungeons underneath the Dreadfort, the rat squirming between his teeth, the taste of warm blood on his lips. If I fail, Ramsay will send me back to that, but first he’ll flay the skin from another finger. “How many of the garrison are left?”

“Some,” said the ironman. “I don’t know. Fewer than we was before. Some in the Drunkard’s Tower too, I think. Not the Children’s Tower. Dagon Codd went over there a few days back. Only two men left alive, he said, and they was eating on the dead ones. He killed them both, if you can believe that.”

Moat Cailin has fallen, Reek realized then, only no one has seen fit to tell them.

And now they are lost, turning on each other, their god forgotten. Cannibalism rears its head again and again in ADWD, as the taboo wilts in the face of winter and war. Theon came here with the knights of summer; Reek returns to find the living dead. Two different armies, two different peoples, as one in his mind now. After all, he’s been trying to bridge this particular gap for most of his life. The abyss awaited both armies to occupy the Moat, as it awaited Theon. Never forget Kubrick’s parting shot in Barry Lyndon:

In ACOK, Theon tried to shed the Northern self exemplified by that shining army at the Moat like dead skin, giving himself over to the image of the Ironborn self in his head. Now Reek returns to Moat Calin to play that image, only to sacrifice it as he was as a child, sacrificed like the men at Moat Cailin to the Old Way...

“Kill him,” Reek told the guard. “His wits are gone. He’s full of blood and worms.”

The man gaped at him. “The captain put him in command.”

“You’d put a dying horse down.”

“What horse? I never had no horse.”

I did. The memory came back in a rush. Smiler’s screams had sounded almost human. His mane afire, he had reared up on his hind legs, blind with pain, lashing out with his hooves. No, no. Not mine, he was not mine, Reek never had a horse. “I will kill him for you.” Reek snatched up Ralf Kenning’s sword where it leaned against his shield. He still had fingers enough to clasp the hilt. When he laid the edge of the blade against the swollen throat of the creature on the straw, the skin split open in a gout of black blood and yellow pus. Kenning jerked violently, then lay still.

...and then again as an adult, this time to the Bastard of Bolton.

Reek swung down from his saddle and took a knee. “My lord, Moat Cailin is yours. Here are its last defenders.”

“So few. I had hoped for more. They were such stubborn foes.” Lord Ramsay’s pale eyes shone. “You must be starved. Damon, Alyn, see to them. Wine and ale, and all the food that they can eat. Skinner, show their wounded to our maesters.”

“Aye, my lord.”

A few of the Ironborn muttered thanks before they shambled off toward the cookfires in the center of the camp. One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

When the last of them were gone, Ramsay Bolton turned his smile on Reek. He clasped him by the back of the head, pulled his face close, kissed him on his cheek, and whispered, “My old friend Reek. Did they really take you for their prince? What bloody fools, these ironmen. The gods are laughing.”

“All they want is to go home, my lord.”

“And what do you want, my sweet Reek?” Ramsay murmured, as softly as a lover. His breath smelled of mulled wine and cloves, so sweet. “Such valiant service deserves a reward. I cannot give you back your fingers or your toes, but surely there is something you would have of me. Shall I free you instead? Release you from my service? Do you want to go with them, return to your bleak isles in the cold grey sea, be a prince again? Or would you sooner stay my leal serving man?”

A cold knife scraped along his spine. Be careful, he told himself, be very, very careful. He did not like his lordship’s smile, the way his eyes were shining, the spittle glistening at the corner of his mouth. He had seen such signs before. You are no prince. You’re Reek, just Reek, it rhymes with freak. Give him the answer that he wants.

“My lord,” he said, “my place is here, with you. I’m your Reek. I only want to serve you. All I ask …a skin of wine, that would be reward enough for me…red wine, the strongest that you have, all the wine a man can drink…”

Lord Ramsay laughed. “You’re not a man, Reek. You’re just my creature. You’ll have your wine, though. Walder, see to it. And fear not, I won’t return you to the dungeons, you have my word as a Bolton. We’ll make a dog of you instead. Meat every day, and I’ll even leave you teeth enough to eat it. You can sleep beside my girls. Ben, do you have a collar for him?”

“I’ll have one made, m’lord,” said old Ben Bones.

The old man did better than that. That night, besides the collar, there was a ragged blanket too, and half a chicken. Reek had to fight the dogs for the meat, but it was the best meal he’d had since Winterfell.

And the wine…the wine was dark and sour, but strong. Squatting amongst the hounds, Reek drank until his head swam, retched, wiped his mouth, and drank some more. Afterward he lay back and closed his eyes. When he woke a dog was licking vomit from his beard, and dark clouds were scuttling across the face of a sickle moon. Somewhere in the night, men were screaming. He shoved the dog aside, rolled over, and went back to sleep.

The next morning Lord Ramsay dispatched three riders down the causeway to take word to his lord father that the way was clear. The flayed man of House Bolton was hoisted above the Gatehouse Tower, where Reek had hauled down the golden kraken of Pyke. Along the rotting-plank road, wooden stakes were driven deep into the boggy ground; there the corpses festered, red and dripping. Sixty-three, he knew, there are sixty-three of them. One was short half an arm. Another had a parchment shoved between its teeth, its wax seal still unbroken.

“So few. I had hoped for more.” The soul shudders. And oh, how casually “somewhere in the night, men were screaming” strolls into the middle of a paragraph, and Reek rolls back over to sleep...

To be clear, I’m not holding Theon responsible for what happens to his sixty-three fellow Ironborn left at the Moat. He’s in no position to refuse Ramsay, as GRRM makes clear in his inner monologue throughout the chapter. But Ramsay is deliberately putting his prisoner through a gauntlet of the self. He has our POV act as Prince Theon son of King Balon, forces him through a cruel mummer’s farce of “choosing” to stay at Ramsay’s side as Reek, and then viciously annihilates the people who represent Theon’s connection to that old identity. It has exactly the effect Ramsay wants: “He pulled down the kraken banner with his own two hands, fumbling some because of his missing fingers but thankful for the fingers that Lord Ramsay had allowed him to keep.” This is what it means to have been Theon and to now be Reek.

This pattern will repeat itself over the course of Theon’s next two chapters, as Roose and Barbrey conspire to have him give Jeyne away to Ramsay publicly, as Theon, and so help cement Bolton control of Winterfell. At every step, Theon's identity is weaponized and turned against him. He flinches from his past, drinks to annihilate his present, and can barely conceive of a future. He is unmoored, drifting through external and internal fog, and he has once again unlocked the North on behalf of heinous authority figures he desperately wants to please. Indeed, Ramsay has wrought a fearsome image of himself in Theon’s mind, a devil equally at home tempting and punishing, and that dynamic is recreated at Moat Cailin:

One of the Codds even tried to kiss Lord Ramsay’s ring, but the hounds drove him back before he could get close, and Alison took a chunk of his ear. Even as the blood streamed down his neck, the man bobbed and bowed and praised his lordship’s mercy.

On that note, one persistent critique of both AFFC and ADWD is that the violence stopped meaning anything--the author started leaning on brutality for brutality’s sake, because he bought into his own rep and/or was out of ideas. I think it’s a valid complaint when it comes to, say, Biter eating Brienne’s face. But on the flipside, the horrific violence in Theon’s storyline is consistently linked to intertwined themes of memory and identity in a manner that I find resonant. Look no further than the man who accepts Ramsay’s offer, and why:

It was the one-armed man who’d flung the axe. As he rose to his feet he had another in his hand. “Who else wants to die?” he asked the other drinkers. “Speak up, I’ll see you do.” Thin red streams were spreading out across the stone from the pool of blood where Dagon Codd’s head had come to rest. “Me, I mean to live, and that don’t mean staying here to rot.”

The one-armed man walked at the head of the procession, limping heavily. His name, he said, was Adrack Humble, and he had a rock wife and three salt wives back on Great Wyk. “Three of the four had big bellies when we sailed,” he boasted, “and Humbles run to twins. First thing I’ll need to do when I get back is count up my new sons. Might be I’ll even name one after you, m’lord.”

Aye, name him Reek, he thought, and when he’s bad you can cut his toes off and give him rats to eat. He turned his head and spat, and wondered if Ralf Kenning hadn’t been the lucky one.

“All they want is to go home, my lord.” And so does Theon, but he has no home to go back to.

Now, of course, Adrack Humble’s dream of counting up his sons is hardly a utopian vision--he kidnapped and enslaved most of their mothers. But the world to which he belongs is the world to which Theon wanted to belong, believing in it so badly he put his life on the line for it...and it failed him, just as it always ultimately fails your average [H]umble man of the Iron Islands. As such, Reek now thinks that the man who rotted without getting his hopes up was the lucky one. This is how he talked when the Young Wolf’s army marched south...

"But such a battle!" said Theon Greyjoy eagerly. "My lady, the realm has not seen such a victory since the Field of Fire. I vow, the Lannisters lost ten men for every one of ours that fell. We've taken close to a hundred knights captive, and a dozen lords bannermen. Lord Westerling, Lord Banefort, Ser Garth Greenfield, Lord Estren, Ser Tytos Brax, Mallor the Dornishman … and three Lannisters besides Jaime, Lord Tywin's own nephews, two of his sister's sons and one of his dead brother's…"

Theon Greyjoy was seated on a bench in Riverrun's Great Hall, enjoying a horn of ale and regaling her father's garrison with an account of the slaughter in the Whispering Wood. "Some tried to flee, but we'd pinched the valley shut at both ends, and we rode out of the darkness with sword and lance. The Lannisters must have thought the Others themselves were on them when that wolf of Robb's got in among them. I saw him tear one man's arm from his shoulder, and their horses went mad at the scent of him. I couldn't tell you how many men were thrown—"

...but his story is always interrupted, his comrades died at dinner, and now he dreams only of blood. We rode to war with songs on our lips, but by the time the last notes faded and left us alone with the silence, we were utterly transformed. When Theon eagerly embraces his wine and his half-chicken and his collar, trusting them to silence the screams, all I can think of is this:

“And the man breaks.

“He turns and runs, or crawls off afterward over the corpses of the slain, or steals away in the black of night, and he finds someplace to hide. All thought of home is gone by then, and kings and lords and gods mean less to him than a haunch of spoiled meat that will let him live another day, or a skin of bad wine that might drown his fear for a few hours. The broken man lives from day to day, from meal to meal, more beast than man. Lady Brienne is not wrong. In times like these, the traveler must beware of broken men, and fear them...but he should pity them as well.”

Two chapters prior to Reek II, half a world away, the Shy Maid sailed through another mournful ruin, and when Tyrion stared into the Sorrows, they stared back.

The grey moss grew thickly here, covering the fallen stones in great mounds and bearding all the towers. Black vines crept in and out of windows, through doors and over archways, up the sides of high stone walls. The fog concealed three-quarters of the palace, but what they glimpsed was more than enough for Tyrion to know that this island fastness had been ten times the size of the Red Keep once and a hundred times more beautiful. He knew where he was. “The Palace of Love,” he said softly.

“That was the Rhoynar name,” said Haldon Halfmaester, “but for a thousand years this has been the Palace of Sorrow.”

The ruin was sad enough, but knowing what it had been made it even sadder. There was laughter here once, Tyrion thought. There were gardens bright with flowers and fountains sparkling golden in the sun. These steps once rang to the sound of lovers’ footsteps, and beneath that broken dome marriages beyond count were sealed with a kiss. His thoughts turned to Tysha, who had so briefly been his lady wife. It was Jaime, he thought, despairing. He was my own blood, my big strong brother. When I was small he brought me toys, barrel hoops and blocks and a carved wooden lion. He gave me my first pony and taught me how to ride him. When he said that he had bought you for me, I never doubted him. Why would I? He was Jaime, and you were just some girl who’d played a part. I had feared it from the start, from the moment you first smiled at me and let me touch your hand. My own father could not love me. Why would you if not for gold?

Through the long grey fingers of the fog, he heard again the deep shuddering thrum of a bowstring snapping taut, the grunt Lord Tywin made as the quarrel took him beneath the belly, the slap of cheeks on stone as he sat back down to die.

And therein lies a theme that runs through ASOIAF but for me finds its richest expressions in A Dance with Dragons: you can’t go home again.

Quentyn did not want to die at all. I want to go back to Yronwood and kiss both of your sisters, marry Gwyneth Yronwood, watch her flower into beauty, have a child by her. I want to ride in tourneys, hawk and hunt, visit with my mother in Norvos, read some of those books my father sends me. I want Cletus and Will and Maester Kedry to be alive again.

Home is haunted, by the love you lost and the family you failed.

The door to the roof of the tower was stuck so fast that it was plain no one had opened it in years. He had to put his shoulder to it to force it open. But when Jon Connington stepped out onto the high battlements, the view was just as intoxicating as he remembered: the crag with its wind-carved rocks and jagged spires, the sea below growling and worrying at the foot of the castle like some restless beast, endless leagues of sky and cloud, the wood with its autumnal colors. “Your father’s lands are beautiful,” Prince Rhaegar had said, standing right where Jon was standing now. And the boy he’d been had replied, “One day they will all be mine.” As if that could impress a prince who was heir to the entire realm, from the Arbor to the Wall.

Griffin’s Roost had been his, eventually, if only for a few short years. From here, Jon Connington had ruled broad lands extending many leagues to the west, north, and south, just as his father and his father’s father had before him. But his father and his father’s father had never lost their lands. He had.

Home is a border wall, a chain digging and twisting.

“Do you have brothers?” Asha asked her keeper.

“Sisters,” Alysane Mormont replied, gruff as ever. “Five, we were. All girls. Lyanna is back on Bear Island. Lyra and Jory are with our mother. Dacey was murdered.”

“The Red Wedding.”

“Aye.” Alysane stared at Asha for a moment. “I have a son. He’s only two. My daughter’s nine.”

“You started young.”

“Too young. But better that than wait too late.”

A stab at me, Asha thought, but let it be. “You are wed.”

“No. My children were fathered by a bear.” Alysane smiled. Her teeth were crooked, but there was something ingratiating about that smile. “Mormont women are skinchangers. We turn into bears and find mates in the woods. Everyone knows.”

Asha smiled back. “Mormont women are all fighters too.”

The other woman’s smile faded. “What we are is what you made us. On Bear Island every child learns to fear krakens rising from the sea.”

The Old Way. Asha turned away, chains clinking faintly.

Home is leagues and years away, and yet so close you can almost touch it.

Bran closed his eyes and slipped free of his skin. Into the roots, he thought. Into the weirwood. Become the tree. For an instant he could see the cavern in its black mantle, could hear the river rushing by below.

Then all at once he was back home again.

Lord Eddard Stark sat upon a rock beside the deep black pool in the godswood, the pale roots of the heart tree twisting around him like an old man’s gnarled arms. The greatsword Ice lay across Lord Eddard’s lap, and he was cleaning the blade with an oilcloth.

“Winterfell,” Bran whispered.

“I have my own ghosts, Bran. A brother that I loved, a brother that I hated, a woman I desired. Through the trees, I see them still, but no word of mine has ever reached them. The past remains the past. We can learn from it, but we cannot change it.”

You have no home. You never will.

Water splashed against the soles of her feet. She was walking in the stream. How long had she been doing that? The soft brown mud felt good between her toes and helped to soothe her blisters. In the stream or out of it, I must keep walking. Water flows downhill. The stream will take me to the river, and the river will take me home.

Except it wouldn’t, not truly.

You’ll give up everything just to get home, please, please...

Jon flexed the fingers of his sword hand. The Night’s Watch takes no part. He closed his fist and opened it again. What you propose is nothing less than treason. He thought of Robb, with snowflakes melting in his hair. Kill the boy and let the man be born. He thought of Bran, clambering up a tower wall, agile as a monkey. Of Rickon’s breathless laughter. Of Sansa, brushing out Lady’s coat and singing to herself. You know nothing, Jon Snow. He thought of Arya, her hair as tangled as a bird’s nest. I made him a warm cloak from the skins of the six whores who came with him to Winterfell…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…I want my bride back…

...but it’s gone.

“I have no wish to die, I promise you. I have …” His voice trailed off into uncertainty. What do I have? A life to live? Work to do? Children to raise, lands to rule, a woman to love?

Home is a time, not a place, and there were so few times that Theon was at home. One of them was here, not so long ago, though it feels like it was. For a brief shining second as the banners caught the breeze, with roaring Umbers and fierce Karstarks, with a powerful army around him, with his brother in all but blood marching to avenge his (their?) father, he knew who he was.

And now, he can’t even remember his name.

How could who I was mean anything if it can be taken away from me like this? I was a Greyjoy among Starks, and then a Stark among Greyjoys; I was Theon and had to become Reek, I am Reek and have to become Theon. Forgive me, he calls through time to the smiling man he used to know, I was not strong enough. But Theon can’t hear Reek and never will.

...and yet.

A light rain had begun to piss down out of the slate-grey sky by the time Lord Ramsay’s camp appeared in front of them. A sentry watched them pass in silence. The air was full of drifting smoke from the cookfires drowning in the rain. A column of riders came wheeling up behind them, led by a lordling with a horsehead on his shield. One of Lord Ryswell’s sons, Reek knew. Roger, or maybe Rickard. He could not tell the two of them apart. “Is this all of them?” the rider asked from atop a chestnut stallion.

“All who weren’t dead, my lord.”

“I thought there would be more. We came at them three times, and three times they threw us back.”

We are Ironborn, he thought, with a sudden flash of pride, and for half a heartbeat he was a prince again, Lord Balon’s son, the blood of Pyke.

We are Ironborn. We are Ironborn. The point isn’t that being Ironborn is, in itself, some great moral progression for Theon. The point is that he just thought of himself as one of them, as Theon, in spite of Ramsay arranging everything that happens in Reek II to convince him that he is not. He has, just for a second, found himself.

This spark grows in strength when Roose Bolton and his army arrives to escort his bastard’s bride home. As I said last time, the identity shell-games extend beyond Theon himself; his arc in ADWD only works as well as it does because it resonates with what’s happening in the plot. The North went south united, but returns divided. Roose doesn’t exactly have “a peaceful land, a quiet people” on his hands, and bringing the hated Freys north will only further provoke Stark loyalists (as we’ll see in later chapters). Moreover, his army had to pass through the Neck, controlled by one of said Stark loyalists, Howland Reed. As such, it’s not safe these days to be Roose Bolton...so he outsourced the job.

Collared and chained and back in rags again, Reek followed with the other dogs at Lord Ramsay’s heels when his lordship strode forth to greet his father. When the rider in the dark armor removed his helm, however, the face beneath was not one that Reek knew. Ramsay’s smile curdled at the sight, and anger flashed across his face. “What is this, some mockery?”

“Just caution,” whispered Roose Bolton, as he emerged from behind the curtains of the enclosed wagon.

This is a terrific way to reintroduce a villain. We haven’t seen Roose since he shed all pretense and revealed himself, a snake with new skin, at the Red Wedding. What could be more fitting than for him to wrong-foot us along with Ramsay upon re-entry? We lean forward to see him, only to hear his soft voice behind us...

Reek pretending to be Theon paved the way for the man pretending to be Roose and the girl pretending to be Arya. It’s a mockery, a mummer’s farce, a hall of mirrors. By weaving the central question of Theon’s story--who am I?--into the characters and plot points surrounding him, GRRM elevates that story. It’s the classic existentialist quest: the eternal hunt of the elusive Real. The question of whether Theon will remember his name fits like a puzzle piece with the question of whether the North will remember its name. And the North remembers.

But Theon, try as he might, is not a Stark...and neither is Ramsay’s bride-to-be.

(image by Elia Fernandez)

Jeyne Poole is not Arya Stark, and everyone knows it. Her presence is a marker of Bolton success: the key to Winterfell, a gift from their Lannister patrons, a declaration that the old has been humbled before and folded into the new. Yet more than anything else, it is the lack of anyone willing to call the Dreadfort men on their fraud that points to their rising fortunes at this moment. This is precisely why Davos’ defiant stand against the Freys in the Merman’s Court (in the chapter immediately prior to this one, worth noting?) hits home so hard. The man who stuck his neck out for the truth will not suffer these noxious lies about what happened to the Northerners who went south, and it’s all the more admirable because he (seemingly) stands alone.

And after a chapter of his identity being used against him, rewarded with a collar for handing his people over to a butcher, telling himself again and again that he is Reek, not Theon but Reek...our POV finally drops the disguise.

The girl was slim, and taller than he remembered, but that was only to be expected. Girls grow fast at that age. Her dress was grey wool bordered with white satin; over it she wore an ermine cloak clasped with a silver wolf’s head. Dark brown hair fell halfway down her back. And her eyes…

That is not Lord Eddard’s daughter.

Arya had her father’s eyes, the grey eyes of the Starks. A girl her age might let her hair grow long, add inches to her height, see her chest fill out, but she could not change the color of her eyes. That’s Sansa’s little friend, the steward’s girl. Jeyne, that was her name. Jeyne Poole.

“Lord Ramsay.” The girl dipped down before him. That was wrong as well. The real Arya Stark would have spat into his face. “I pray that I will make you a good wife and give you strong sons to follow after you.”

“That you will,” promised Ramsay, “and soon.”

It’s only internal. There’s nothing moral about it yet. He’s yet to relate her fortunes to his own. But by allowing Reek to play Theon, Ramsay has unknowingly reintroduced his captive’s pre-captivity identity into his bloodstream like an antivirus, and Jeyne’s arrival crystallizes what this means for our POV. If she’s not Arya, then he’s not Reek.

The past is present. The mud you pack into that hole in the ruined wall won’t keep your ghosts at bay. But (to borrow from Barristan) mud can nourish the seeds from which you will grow, your past the fertilizer for your rebirth.

At the edge of the wolfswood, Bran turned in his basket for one last glimpse of the castle that had been his life. Wisps of smoke still rose into the grey sky, but no more than might have risen from Winterfell's chimneys on a cold autumn afternoon. Soot stains marked some of the arrow loops, and here and there a crack or a missing merlon could be seen in the curtain wall, but it seemed little enough from this distance. Beyond, the tops of the keeps and towers still stood as they had for hundreds of years, and it was hard to tell that the castle had been sacked and burned at all. The stone is strong, Bran told himself, the roots of the trees go deep, and under the ground the Kings of Winter sit their thrones. So long as those remained, Winterfell remained. It was not dead, just broken. Like me, he thought. I'm not dead either.

#theon greyjoy #ramsay bolton #a dance with dragons #theon in adwd #asoiaf meta #moat cailin #roose bolton #jeyne poole #a game of thrones

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aion-rsa · 6 years ago

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The Umbrella Academy Review (Spoiler Free)

http://bit.ly/2UGi03k

Netflix's The Umbrella Academy is an admirable attempt to bring the comic to the small screen that ultimately misses the mark.

Books

This Umbrella Academy review does not contain spoilers.

Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba's The Umbrella Academy, which opens with the spontaneous birth of 43 superpowered babies right at the moment a wrestler elbow drops a giant space squid in the ring, might be unadaptable. Despite its best efforts to capture the delightful weirdness of the comic as well as expand on some of the storylines only hinted at in the book, the new Netflix series is ultimately too grounded and sluggish to really keep us invested. The series never quite finds its rhythm until the very end and is surprisingly dull throughout, especially in the first few exposition-heavy episodes.

The Umbrella Academy is the story of the Hargreeves orphans, a super-powered group of kids mysteriously born at the exact same time in different parts of the world, who are trained by their cold and manipulative adoptive father, Sir Reginald Hargreeves, to save the world. Originally a famous superhero team of seven -- Luther, Diego, Allison, Klaus, Number Five, Ben, and Vanya -- the family slowly begins to decay as the years go by. One sibling dies during a mission while Number Five capriciously travels far into the future against his father's wishes, never to be seen again. Most of the others eventually pack up and leave the Academy when they're old enough.

When the series begins, it's been 12 years since the team was together. But when Sir Reginald suddenly dies -- seemingly of natural causes, although Luther (Tom Hopper), the loyal leader of the team, is not so sure -- his adult children are forced into a nightmarish family reunion and back into old habits. As you would expect, things do not go well.

It should be said up front that viewers expecting an action-packed superhero romp or something akin to Netflix's Marvel lineup will be sorely disappointed. The Umbrella Academy is not that kind of show, trading in the action sequences (of which there are very few) for slightly long-winded family drama. Of course, this won't surprise fans of the Eisner-winning series, itself a deconstruction of iconic superhero teams such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and most importantly, DC's Doom Patrol, one of the comic's major influences. While the Netflix series does an admirable job of trying to captivate its audience with this particularly dysfunctional family of super-weirdos, it does so at the expense of its pacing. The Umbrella Academy is incredibly slow.

The show's biggest problem is that it tries to stretch the book's six-issue first volume, "Apocalypse Suite," into 10 50-minute episodes, with bits and pieces of the second arc, "Dallas," thrown in. It's clear two or three episodes in that the show doesn't have enough material to keep things moving to the end, so showrunner Steve Blackman (Altered Carbon) and writer Jeremy Slater (Fantastic Four) crafted new storylines and expanded others while also remixing a few of the comic's character arcs. Unfortunately, these "bonus" scenes and new subplots rarely work. At times, they're actually detrimental to the characters.

Further Reading: Gerard Way on Umbrella Academy: Hotel Oblivion

This is largely the case for protagonist Vanya Hargreeves (Ellen Page), who is inexplicably thrust into an unnecessary romantic subplot. In the comics, Vanya is an outcast, neglected by the emotionally abusive Sir Reginald and sidelined by her narcissistic siblings. When her father dies, she's lonely and without a support system, harboring a quiet animosity towards her brothers and sisters, who are too busy dealing with their own drama to notice her. They've never let her in, even with her father removed from the equation. So when Vanya makes the choice to leave the family behind and go her own way, it's not really all that surprising.

The show, on the other hand, puts Vanya in an awkward relationship in order to flesh out another major player from the comics. The problem might be that the show never fully commits to the relationship, spoiling a big twist before we're ever really even invested in Vanya's love life. In the end, Vanya's story feels diluted by the additional subplot.

It's all in service of getting this show, which could have easily been two or three episodes shorter, to the finish line. Other annoying additions include a murder mystery surrounding Diego (David Castaneda), the family's robotic caretaker Mom (Jordan Claire Robbins), and their super-intelligent chimpanzee friend Pogo (Adam Godley); and an extended look at time-traveling assassins Cha-Cha (Mary J. Blige) and Hazel (Cameron Britton), who also falls victim to a strange romantic storyline. In the case of the murder mystery, the family members search for Sir Reginald's missing monocle -- which might provide evidence of foul play in connection to his death -- but it never really goes anywhere. To make matters worse, the show basically gives up on the yarn in the third act, giving the audience the answer with a few lines of exposition.

Meanwhile, troubled, drug-addicted Klaus (Robert Sheehan) gets much more screentime than comic fans might expect, and Sheehan is excellent in the role as if it were written for him. But too often, perhaps inspired by Sheehan's outrageous performance as Nathan Young in Misfits, the character is played for laughs. The result is a joke that begins to feel repetitive. Klaus is nowhere near this dim-witted in the comics. One thing that does work in Klaus' favor is his ability to communicate with the dead, which adds a horror element to the show. When Klaus learns to finally use this power to his advantage in the climactic battle, I absolutely cheered.

Further Reading: The Umbrella Academy Cast on Creating a New Kind of Superhero Show

While all that's going on, knife-wielding Diego, the rogue of the family, also gets a love interest, and it's by far the least interesting love story of all. Why Blackman and Slater felt that the only way to explore many of these characters was through romance is beyond me. In Way and Ba's comic, introspection doesn't come from the romantic, but through the familial ties that bind. For example, in the comic, Diego has to figure out a way to work with Luther, an altruistic hero who is sort of incompetent at being the team's leader, and while at first Diego despises his brother, they end up growing together. In the third arc of the comic, it's Diego, a loner by nature, who has to convince a depressed Luther to get the team back together.

It's clear that everyone involved with this adaptation has real love for the comic, from the way it accurately recreates the young Umbrella Academy's costumes to the camera angles that recall the work of film auteur Wes Anderson, who is a clear influence on both the book and the show (you could almost imagine this as Anderson's very own take on the superhero genre, with all of the beautiful shots and retro zaniness). Blackman and his crew really took the time to make the show look and sound great -- one particular shot of helicopters flying over Vietnam comes to mind -- but it also feels like they don't fully understand what makes Way and Ba's fast-paced, minimalist, vignette-heavy family drama so effective.

Despite my complaints about Vanya's extended storyline, I'm happy to say that Page's performance as the timid and anxious main character of this family tragedy is top notch. She makes the best of every scene she's in, even when her romantic counterpart isn't quite up to the task. Page is subtle in scenes with her over-the-top siblings, layering in claustrophobic loneliness over her deep-seated anger at being the sister everyone always ignores. I loved watching Vanya absolutely lose her shit later in the season, and Page has already given us so much by that point that it's impossible not to sympathize with her character, even as she takes a dark turn that she may not be able to return from.

Number Five, played by Aidan Gallagher, who's spent most of his career on Nickelodeon kids shows, is also a highlight. Gallagher is well-cast and is able to convey the wisdom beyond his years necessary for the role of a 60-year-old hitman trapped inside the body of a 10-year-old (although he's slightly older than that on the show). He rarely cracks a smile as the self-serious Number Five, or partake in his family's childish shenanigans, but when he does let loose, it's entertaining and very funny.

Further Reading: Everything You Need to Know About Avengers: Endgame

This trigger-happy hero-turned-assassin is also one of the few characters who benefit from an expanded storyline. The show dives much deeper into Number Five's backstory, giving us colorful pieces of his backstory the comic never has. Along the way, we learn much more about the secret organization Number Five worked for before rejoining his family in the present day. His interactions with this faction of time-jumping assassins are among the best in the entire series. Here, the show doesn't rely on romance to flesh out a character and it's really refreshing.

Surprisingly, Luther and Allison (Emmy Raver-Lampman) get the least to do. While at the forefront of the comic, Luther takes a backseat to the characters the people behind the show are really enamored with, like Vanya, Klaus, Number Five, and Diego. On the show, Luther is a bit more bumbling and I had a hard time believing that any of these characters would actually follow him into battle, but there are some high points for him, too. His story is one of self-discovery, as he steps out from under his father's shadow for the first time (this is a man who's never had a drink or done a drug or rebelled against his dad), and it's in Luther's search for clarity as an independent adult for basically the first time that this character shines.

Allison is in the middle of losing a family, even as she regains another. "Hotel Oblivion," the current comic's third arc, begins to explore why Allison, who can alter reality at will by telling lies, has become alienated from her husband and daughter. The show expands on that, showing what created the rift, and it perfectly fits the character.

As the credits roll on an enjoyable final episode, it's hard to call Netflix's The Umbrella Academy a success, but like its troubled family of freaks, it's not a lost cause. There are parts of the series I really liked -- the latter half of Klaus' arc when he's given a bit more depth, a hilarious showdown involving an ice cream truck, and a character's complete infatuation with the torso of a mannequin -- that hint at a freshness that could set it apart from other superhero TV and movies. The Umbrella Academy is at its strongest when it commits to the weirder elements of its story and world, such as the aforementioned talking chimpanzee, and does itself a disservice by trying to ground its characters in needless romance and the menial. Like Vanya herself, there's potential here, the show just needs to go off the deep end first.

John Saavedra is an associate editor at Den of Geek. Read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @johnsjr9.

2.5/5

Netflix

The Umbrella Academy

Gerard Way

Review John Saavedra

Feb 4, 2019

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gibsongirlselections · 4 years ago

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Reagan: Pragmatist or Conservative Purist?

Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016, by Marcus Witcher, University Press of Kansas, 448 pages, February 2020.

On January 19, 1989, as the fortieth president of the United States, Ronald Reagan, departed the White House, the New York Times reported that “no one credits Mr. Reagan with being much of an intellect,” the went on to question, “does anyone call him a hard worker or active leader.” Rather, the newspaper of record claimed, Reagan’s “strength lay in delivering lines that were arranged for him.” While such words might not be totally shocking, given the source, what Marcus Witcher reveals in his extraordinary and critical new book, Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016, is that such views did not emerge merely from the left. Conservatives, too, dumped on Reagan, criticizing everything from his failure to free the market sufficiently enough to his placating of the Soviet Union. To be sure, no one, left or right, could have predicted the complete collapse of Eastern European communism over the next several months, and such knowledge might very well have reshaped even the New York Times’s opinion of the greatest president of the twentieth century.

Witcher: The Best of the Best of the Rising Generation

A recently-minted PhD in history, Marcus M. Witcher is, arguably, the finest and most impressive young scholar in a generation. As his first book it would make even the most senior scholar and historian proud. Even the opening line—“Ronald Reagan was no conservative ideologue”—is immediately captivating. From there, the book only improves. “This book recasts Reagan as a shrewd political operator who often moderated his conservative positions—much to the vexation of conservatives during the 1980s.” Rather than being ideological on fine points of intellectual rigor, “Reagan was a pragmatic conservative who understood that building coalitions across party lines was essential to effective governance.”

Getting Right with Reagan advances four arguments.

First, Witcher convincingly argues that conservatives thought little of Reagan during his two terms as president. They were, for better or worse, the first to criticize the man and find his shortcomings.

Second, the author notes, again well, that Reagan’s successful waging of the Cold War—though, mostly in hindsight—allowed conservatives to recreate their image of him as a sort of secular demigod, allowing his life and character to be the “glue” that holds together the movement after the fall of communism. Prior to Reagan’s success as a Cold Warrior, anti-communism had held together the various strands of conservatism.

Third, Witcher claims that post-Reagan conservatives and Republicans have moved “significantly to the right.” These post-Reagan conservatives seek to out-Reagan each other. In other words, Reagan has become a myth and a symbol far different than he was in reality.

Finally, Witcher makes a convincing case for ending his study in 2016. When I first saw the title—before having read the book—I scratched my head. Why not take the analysis up through 2019? As it turns out, Witcher reveals that Trump has never attached himself to the Reagan legacy or to the large currents of conservatism. Rather, he had done everything possible to present only himself, in full populist mode, separate from any recent president. “Trump did not invoke Reagan’s name or run on his platform during the primary or general election,” Witcher writes in the conclusion. “Trump showed little to no inclination to embrace Reagan’s legacy at all, and many of his policy positions” have been simply contrary to Reagan’s own. Crazily, both President Obama and former Secretary of State Clinton have more explicitly embraced Reagan than has Trump.

In all of this, as should be obvious from the header, Witcher has painstakingly researched not only his position but every possible variation of criticism of Ronald Reagan from all parts of the political spectrum and even some from the apolitical. Kudos, of course, to the University Press of Kansas for allowing Witcher to employ nearly 150 pages of the book to endnotes and bibliography. The endnotes are not only stunningly masterful in terms of scope and breadth, but they are also revealing in terms of textual details. If I have one complaint about the book’s layout, it is that I might have sprained my wrist turning from chapter to endnotes. Certainly, the book is well constructed. If it had not been, the spine would’ve easily become unhinged from such page turning. Here’s hoping the second edition of this excellent book will have footnotes rather than endnotes.

What about Conservative Intellectuals?

If Witcher is to be criticized—and one would only do so at the reviewer’s own peril, as Witcher has anticipated almost all possible arguments against his position—it would be for conflating conservative intellectuals and academics with conservative pundits and talking heads. Witcher references and quotes William F. Buckley and Patrick Buchanan, but he looks to Russell Kirk only once, and he completely ignores Robert Nisbet, Eric Voegelin, Harry Jaffa, and their students.

Thus, one can question what exactly conservatism means. In the book one realizes quickly that conservatism is never actually defined, as it is a moving target, given status relative to the meanings assigned to it over the past forty years.

If Witcher had taken the views of, for instance, those of Kirk, Nisbet, and Jaffa, he might be able to offer his readers an objective lodestar, something by which one could navigate the last four decades of conservatism.

In his own writings, Kirk never failed to praise Reagan for being one of the—if not the—greatest conservatives of the twentieth century. In Reagan’s first year in office, Kirk gushed:

For his power of will, Ronald Reagan is honored already. He has had the audacity to declare that this American Republic will endure and thrive. He has been sufficiently bold to set his face against the prophets of decay. With the old Romans, he knows that audacity is a bulwark, and that fortune both fears and fears the audacious. The American Republic commenced with audacity; if that audacity is exhausted, the Republic must end. Ronald Reagan, the audacious American stage-manager just now, is not disposed to let fall that iron curtain of national destiny. For him, the American drama is not yet played out.

Reagan awarded Kirk the “Presidential Medal of Freedom” in 1989, and the recipient never lost his admiration for the 40th president. In his final words written towards the president, he wrote, “In Reagan was no touch of pomposity. He did not take himself more gravely, nor the world more gravely, than he must. After suffering some defeat in the Congress, he did not repine, but laughed, perhaps. He jested with bullets in him.”

Of the prominent conservative intellectuals of the 1980s, only Robert Nisbet openly disliked Reagan. Nisbet saw Reagan as a progressive in foreign as well as domestic policy. Reagan had, to Nisbet’s dismay, only honed and perfected the old Puritan jeremiad, proclaiming anywhere and everywhere, that America could perfect herself and claim a unique and expectational position in world history. In the pages of this august journal, only eleven years ago, my esteemed and beloved colleague, Richard Gamble, made a similar claim: “But overall, Reagan preached yet another version of sinless, progressive America that had more in common with Tom Paine and Woodrow Wilson than with Edmund Burke.”

Even more diabolic, according to Nisbet, Reagan used national security, like Nixon before him, as a cover for a coup d’��tat. “Before it is over the Reagan administration may well be proved to have captured the prize for systematic lying to the public,” Nisbet argued. “The Iran-contra episode alone has made the administration a formidable contender for the century’s prize. But it is well to recall that an imposing background exists for the Reagan accomplishments in public deception, a background going all the way back to President Wilson.”

Though Eric Voegelin never commented on Reagan beyond mere statements of fact, one of his most important students, Richard Allen, served as Reagan’s first National Security Advisor. Allen remembers well his conversation about the Cold War with Reagan 1977. When Allen asked the older man who he would wage the war against the Soviets, he merely answered, “My theory of the Cold War is, we win and they lose. What do you think about that?” Reagan, Allen remembers, never wavered on this issue. “Reagan went right to the heart of the matter. Utilizing American values, strength, and creativity, he believed we could outdistance the Soviets and cause them to withdraw from the Cold War, or perhaps even to collapse. Herein lay the great difference, back in early 1977, between Reagan and every other politician: He literally believed we could win, and was prepared to carry this message to the nation as the intellectual foundation of a presidency.” Never did Reagan’s understanding of freedom being superior to Soviet tyranny shift. “These themes never varied in the essentials, primarily because he was the principal author of everything he said,” Allen records, “and he would never say anything with which he disagreed.”

In Sum

None of these criticisms are worthy of much contemplation. My own interests lie in what conservative intellectuals think rather than what conservative pundits do. But I’m not the author of this wonderful book, and I cannot blame Witcher for writing the book that I might (but did not) have written. On his own terms and on his own ground, he had nothing to prove. More accurately he has through Getting Right with Reagan, already proven himself to be one of the finest young historians in the United States at present. That Witcher has no full-time, tenured position is not only criminal, but it reveals just how corrupt and bizarre academia is. Any college worth its salt should scoop this fine young scholar up just as quickly as possible.

Bradley J. Birzer is author of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth: Understanding Middle-earth as well as The Inklings: Tolkien and the Men of the West (forthcoming, ISI Books).

The post Reagan: Pragmatist or Conservative Purist? appeared first on The American Conservative.

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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"Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. In this case, I think it is the opposite. The Trump Tower meeting was a farce. The president’s brazen actions now, if proven, will be a tragedy for American democracy."

It looks like Donald Trump followed Robert Mueller’s green light to commit crimes. https://t.co/iWuMT40G4J via @slate

Trump’s Ukraine Gambit Could Be Another Campaign Finance Crime

Unfortunately, Robert Mueller may have given the president the green light to solicit foreign interference again.

By RICHARD L. HASEN | Published SEPT 22, 2019 5:32 PM ET | Slate | Posted September 23, 2019 12:00 PM |

President Donald Trump may well have committed a new campaign finance crime if he, as reported, pressured Ukraine into providing dirt on a political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and Biden’s son Hunter. Unfortunately, special counsel Robert Mueller may have stymied any future DOJ’s ability to enforce that law when he gave Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. a pass earlier this year on similar conduct. If Trump has again sought foreign assistance in an election, Mueller’s decision not to enforce the law last time around is partly to blame for the president acting with total impunity along with an accompanying decay of democratic norms.

The current charges are serious. The Wall Street Journal reported over the weekend that “President Trump in a July phone call repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden ’s son, according to people familiar with the matter, urging Volodymyr Zelensky about eight times to work with Rudy Giuliani on a probe that could hamper Mr. Trump’s potential 2020 opponent.” And in describing the conversation with Zelensky to the press on Sunday, Trump suggested he asked for dirt not just on Biden’s son but on Biden himself. “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory. It was largely corruption—all of the corruption taking place,” Trump said. “It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

The revelations come after a mysterious whistleblower complaint from someone in the intelligence community last month who reportedly claimed that Trump made “promises” to a foreign leader. As the New York Times further reported, Trump’s “interest over the summer in a Ukrainian investigation into Mr. Biden … coincided with his administration’s decision to hold up $250 million in security aid to Ukraine.” That money was eventually released earlier this month after congressional pressure from both sides of the aisle.

Putting aside whether Trump made promises in order to get Biden-related dirt, or whether his conduct counts as extortion or bribery, there is a good argument that if the facts as reported are true, Trump committed a new campaign finance crime. (Trump has already been directly implicated in Michael Cohen’s campaign finance offense related to the Stormy Daniels payment, for which the president’s former lawyer is currently serving prison time). The case against this sort of behavior as a campaign finance crime was much stronger, though, before Mueller issued his report investigating foreign interference in the 2016 elections and refused to prosecute Trump Jr.

Federal law makes it a crime for any person to “solicit” any “thing of value” from a foreign national. Could Trump pressing Ukraine’s president to help his candidacy by investigating a political rival qualify as a crime under the statute?

The identical issue came up with Trump. Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting during the 2016 election. As readers may recall, during that presidential campaign, Trump Jr. got an email from his friend Rob Goldstone stating that the “Crown prosecutor of Russia” had “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.” This “high level and sensitive information” was being presented as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. replied almost immediately, “If it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.” The subsequent meeting, held on June 9, 2016, included Trump Jr.; Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort; the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Goldstone; and a number of Russians connected with the Russian government.

One of the things Mueller investigated was whether the meeting violated the federal law against soliciting foreign assistance in an election. Mueller in his report acknowledged that under court and Federal Election Commission precedent, opposition research can count as a “thing of value” for federal campaign finance purposes. He nonetheless declined to prosecute Trump Jr. for four reasons.

First, Mueller said that did not find enough admissible evidence that Trump Jr. or other Trump campaign officials acted “willfully.” To make a campaign finance violation a crime, one must know one is committing a crime. Trump Jr. would not sit down for a voluntary interview with Mueller and the special counsel regrettably did not subpoena Trump Jr. to testify to get at his mental state, but Mueller determined “the government has not obtained admissible evidence” that was likely to prove Trump Jr.’s willfulness “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Second, Mueller defined the law narrowly to require greater proof of “coordination” before a solicitation could be found. Third, he said he wasn’t sure that the value of the information was at least $25,000, the necessary threshold to make it a crime. Fourth and finally, Mueller said that prosecuting Trump Jr. could raise free speech questions. As I noted at the time, the First Amendment defense is bogus:

The main First Amendment argument is that a ban on soliciting foreign political contributions is overly broad and could apply any time a foreign individual gives any information to a political campaign.

But Trump Jr. was a major campaign official meeting with representatives from a foreign government that were offering “dirt” on the campaign’s opponent. As I [have written], “To let someone off the hook who solicited ‘very high level and sensitive information’ from a hostile government because there may be cases in which information from a foreign source does not raise the same danger to our national security and right of self-government is to turn the First Amendment into a tool to kill American democracy.”

Further, even if Mueller believed there were First Amendment questions in play, he should have left that for the courts to decide given the strong national security interests at stake here. Mueller offered no First Amendment argument in his report. He merely flagged the issue and never provided any analysis to back up the First Amendment claim.

I’m afraid that this flagging of the issue does more harm than good. Mueller has now given campaigns credible reason to believe they can accept help from foreign governments because they may have a constitutional right to do so. That’s even more troubling for what it says about 2020 than what it says about 2016.

And now here we are in the 2020 election season with Trump and Ukraine. Thinking of the four concerns raised by Mueller, the first three elements do not save the president in this case. As to willfulness, there’s no way the president does not know that the solicitation of foreign opposition research constitutes a crime following the Mueller probe. He was even pressed on this by George Stephanopoulos last year and said he might accept such research again, which resulted in the head of the Federal Election Commission releasing a statement to once again clarify that, yes, this would be a crime. We will likely have a recording and a transcript of the Ukraine call, so evidence of the solicitation itself will be easy to find if it exists. Third, Biden is the leading Democratic presidential candidate who has a good chance of running directly against Trump in the 2020 election; of course any “dirt” on Biden would be worth more than $25,000.

So this leaves the First Amendment defense. Thanks to Mueller, Trump can plausibly claim he has a First Amendment right to go to a foreign government to solicit—even potentially extort—valuable information against political opponents. If the First Amendment protected this conduct from Trump, why even hold elections?

Ultimately, the best legal argument is that Trump committed a campaign finance crime if he solicited dirt on Biden and his son, as appears to be the case, regardless of whether there was any quid pro quo. But Mueller, despite expressing concern about potential foreign interference in the 2020 elections in his recent testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, may have given Trump a green light through his own report.

Karl Marx once wrote that history repeats itself, first as tragedy then as farce. In this case, I think it is the opposite. The Trump Tower meeting was a farce. The president’s brazen actions now, if proven, will be a tragedy for American democracy.

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householdrepaircenter · 7 years ago

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Norman family tradition lives on at Bud’s Corner

LG Refrigerator Repair in Mumbai–Willie Eason is a regular visitor to Bud’s Corner, an oft-overlooked section of North Nashville real estate named for Edward “Bud” Norman, the man who owned this three-block section of the city, putting a firm stamp of family and love on it that continues eight years after his death.

His son, Terry, 63, is the “mayor” of Bud’s Corner, maintaining stability here on Buchanan Street – about a half-block off D.B. Todd – even as the neighborhood declined from disuse after many middle-class Nashvillians chased mercantile, educational and residential needs out to the suburbs.LG Refrigerator Repair in Mumbai

Now Bud’s Hardware & Key Shop is not only the neighborhood “go-to” for toilet valves, drain snakes and the like, it is a literal cornerstone of revitalization as gentrification begins its slow but sure takeover of the Buchanan Street Business District and surrounding neighborhood.

What Terry has maintained here in Bud’s Corner is a neighborhood hub of commerce and good conversation that now is seeing even more traffic thanks to the needs of crews working to revive old homes or build skinny new ones for the invaders not only from the other side of the tracks, but from Los Angeles, New York, Joliet or whatever the latest hipster launching pad.

LG Refrigerator Repair in Mumbai – “I come in here because he knows how to do it,” says Willie, nodding toward Terry. He is loyal to Bud’s, except for during Sunday night emergencies. For example, the night before Willie and I huddle in the plumbing section of Bud’s, he was forced to patronize a soul-sucking box store.

“I’m a deacon at King Solomon Missionary Baptist Church,” says Willie, adding he only went to the hardware behemoth because Bud’s was closed. (Terry’s monument of screwdrivers, fertilizer and All-American values is open 7-6 Monday-Saturday, 7-2 Sundays.)

Willie was longtime sous-chef de cuisine at what was an outlaw-era, Vegas-flavored Nashville hot spot: Roger Miller’s King of the Road Motor Inn and “The Roof,” its rocking and rolling top floor restaurant and bar. It was not uncommon to come upon the city’s musical elite – Roger, of course, lived there part-time with his family – while the house band, led by sightless and soulful country hero Ronnie Milsap, played long and hard into the night.

A journalist I know too well spent a lot of time, even a New Year’s Eve or two, at Roger’s joint.

Deacon Willie and I both lament what has become of that glitz-and-rhinestone monument, its long decline serving as a stunning example of Nashville’s decades of urban decay and now – and it’s about damn time – rebirth.

The Clarion Hotel Downtown-Stadium (inside the old King of the Road shell) is likely a fine place and I’m sure refurbished nicely for the hordes of tourists who add to the “It City” myth by carrying their offerings to the altar – actually the tip jars and beer bars – at Tootsie’s, Robert’s or any of the joints that make up Nashville’s Lower Broad, honky-tonk Disney World.

LG fridge Repair in Mumbai – I’ve never visited the hotel since Roger left town, and, dang me, I should. But the building is no longer the celebratory HQ of Nashville high life. The damn nice guy and witty genius who sang of trailers for sale or rent and the dangers of roller-skating in a buffalo herd succumbed to cancer in 1992. He was 56.

Before retiring to his beloved North Nashville home, Deacon Willie, 72, spent 39 years as chef at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta’s Nashville Branch.

“Today I’m here with this,” Willie points out, holding up small copper pipe that, when working properly, carries water from beneath his kitchen sink to his home refrigerator’s ice-maker.

“Last night, there was some hissing under the sink,” he says, following up that statement by making the “sssssssssss” sound created by the water leak.

He’s waiting his turn to get Terry to take a look at the faulty connector pipe and help him figure out how to replace it.

“I been coming in here since I’ve been in the neighborhood,” Willie adds. “I remember when Terry was little. Terry’s father was a good, fine gentleman who knew how to treat customers. He knows, too.” He motions his busted pipe part toward Terry.

Indeed, Deacon Willie is just one of a storm of loyal customers keeping Bud’s Hardware not only thriving, but continually busy. At least it was during the three days I spent in those friendly confines where everything from pipe to locks to weed killer and grass seed is easily found.

Terry and his crew also cut glass to order for replacing busted windows.LG fridge Repair in Mumbai

Terry proudly will tell you that pretty much all hardware, landscaping and building needs can be filled here. Heck, there even are fishing rods over on the wall near a rainbow of colors of plastic Weed Eater string.

Bud’s Hardware started its life as an A&W Root Beer stand, but has been Bud’s Hardware since 1965. Terry Norman, who now runs the hardware store, also worked at the drive-in mixing root beer.— Tim Ghianni | The Ledger

Outside, beneath the awning, fishing bait shares space with grass seed. And yes, the American Flag waves proudly above a wall where a 20-foot extension ladder serves as exclamation point.

“Dad started out with Bud’s Curb Market in 1956,” says Terry, after he and long-time employee Gary Floyd find the right parts and try to guide Deacon Willie through the task he faces when working beneath the kitchen sink to reconnect the icemaker.

Gary, who has worked in the hardware store for 25 years, notes that he’s “mostly in sales. … I make sure we’ve got stuff on the shelves. … I also make sure this place is good and clean.” Gary pilots a broom to eliminate dirt that’s invisible to an old, bleary-eyed journalist.

“What’s up, T?” says another man who enters the store in pursuit of some sort of thingamajig. Terry – aka “T” – asks him what he needs and, without a pause, Gary steps in to lead the man to it. I don’t know what it is, as I always try to stay out of the way when I invade someone’s business for a few hours.

But I do see the man smiling broadly as he steps out the front door onto the sidewalk of Bud’s Corner at 16th Avenue North & Buchanan.

He had disappeared into the traffic by the time I made it outside to ask his name. Seemed like a nice guy, though. Happy, too.LG fridge Repair in Mumbai

My time with Terry comes in spurts during my visits, as he’s working hard, along with his son, Jonathon, and with Gary. Got to keep the customers satisfied.

“A lot of people call me ‘Bud,’ and I don’t mind, but that was my dad,” he explains.

“You know what a curb market is?” he asks, motioning through the windows and across Buchanan where he’s now landlord to the folks who’ve been leasing “Bud’s Curb Market” since sometime in the ’80s.LG fridge Repair in Mumbai

“That’s where people drive right up to the curb and you carry their groceries to them,” he explains. “Don’t think there are many around … They don’t do it there anymore, either.”

Amid customers’ testosterone-fueled discussions of “how to fix stuff” and comparisons of their nuts and bolts, Terry tells me that this building once was a teenage haven, an A&W Root Beer establishment that opened around 1960.

Gary Floyd dusts off a display case.at Bud’s Corner Hardware Store.— Tim Ghianni | The Ledger

“You know it was like a Sonic,” Terry recalls. “We took the orders out to people’s cars.”

There also were windows for walk-up service and a few seats inside. “We didn’t do a lot of dining-in here.”

He explains that the A&W was turned into Bud’s Hardware in 1965 or so as a sly businessman’s move by Bud himself.

“My dad had a lot of rental property. Forty-four houses he rented out,” Terry remembers. As a landlord, of course, Bud had to handle upkeep and repair.

He quickly realized that it would be a good move to open a hardware store where he could buy those repair supplies from himself.

Bud’s A&W became just a sweet and frothy memory.

And Bud wasn’t done with his Bud’s Corner business empire.

In 1970, he opened Bud’s Auto Parts just across Buchanan and near the Curb Market. And just across 16th from the hardware store is the former site of Bud’s Auto Repair.LG Refrigerator Repair in Mumbai

“That was good business,” Terry says. Again, it was one of Bud’s businesses – the parts store – supplying another – the repair shop.

Old Bud, a savvy businessman, gave his wife Daphne (aka “Mickey”) and their family the good life out in West Meade while he tended to this then-thriving, now reawakening Buchanan neighborhood.

The auto parts and auto repair businesses have long been shut down, but I’ve been told by a trio of young, Buchanan-based entrepreneurs that they’re planning to turn the repair shop building into a for-rent party space for receptions and the like.

As Terry answers the phone, his own son, Jonathon, 43 – who one day will take over the business completely – grinds the key-making machine for a customer.

“That’s me there,” says Terry, pointing to an old black-and-white photo mounted on one end of the counter composed of separate islands, allowing customers easy access to hand tools and assorted hardware “smalls” hanging on the wall behind the register and glass-cutting station.

In that old photo – displayed near a long line of FOP, Lodge 5, booster decals – is a young boy whose back is turned to the camera, with bold lettering reading “Bud’s A&W” on his shiny varsity jacket.

“I used to make the root beer,” acknowledges Terry, the kid in that jacket. “You had to mix so many gallons of syrup with so many gallons of water with so many pounds of sugar.”

Terry Norman, right, assists Abraham Ghirmai, making sure glass is cut just right for one of Abraham’s properties.— Tim Ghianni | The Ledger

Bud turned over all the A&W-making to his son. “I was good at it, too,” says Terry, smiling at the snapshot of his past.

Customer Kevin Jones, 55, is another local resident who finds his way to Bud’s neighborhood hardware store instead of pursuing anonymous frustration while navigating box stores. When he was a kid, he came here for root beer.

“His Daddy and him would be here when he was just a little bitty boy,” says Kevin, remembering the teenage Terry making the brew destined for so many floats and frosty mugs.

“I know a lot of the families in the neighborhood,” says Terry. Most know him as well.

A tall working man briefly enters our conversation. “I need a No. 3 bit,” he says, with Terry responding by reaching into his rack of drill bits.

“You want this?” he asks, handing it over. “We don’t sell very many threes.”

The satisfied man pays for the bit and ambles out onto Buchanan as another customer comes inside to take his place.

“I got two toilets that are too slow. I need some Liquid Fire,” he tells Terry, who returns with a fairly large bottle.

“When you put it in a toilet, it’s not like when you put it in the drain. You need to put it in and flush one time. Then leave it. That will get it where it’s needed,’’ Terry says.

The credit-card scanner isn’t working, so the man fishes a dozen dollar bills from his hip pocket and hands ’em to Terry, who makes change.

Robert Buggs, 70, says he spends his free time – when he’s not fulfilling his duties as the maintenance contractor at the House of God over at 26th North and Heiman – refurbishing homes for the hipster invasion.

He says he stops in at Bud’s Hardware on a regular basis, gathering the tools and materials he needs to fix up the houses or perhaps make repairs when on a mission from God.

“It’s convenient,” he says, then points at Terry. “I been coming here ever since Terry was like that.”

He lowers his right hand to about belt-level to illustrate his early memories of the man some call “Bud,” if they don’t know any better. “That man (Terry) is nice and friendly and makes you welcome every time you come into his store.”

Jonathon Norman, Terry Norman’s son, represents the future of Bud’s Hardware.— Tim Ghianni | The Ledger

“Abraham!” comes a “Norm”-like chorus of customers and store staffers as a sprightly 73-year-old enters this place where everybody knows his name. “How you doin’?”

Abraham Ghirmai says he too comes here to get tools and stuff to take care of rental property.

Today, as he waits for Terry, and then Gary, to cut some replacement window glass, he sings the praises of this store and the men who occupy it. “I find what I need here and their prices is fair and they are friendly.”

Another regular, a plumber with no need to waste time speaking with a journalist in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, rushes into the store, heads to what he needs and retrieves it, carrying it to Jonathon at the cash register.

“I’m trying to fix a sink,” the plumber growls, as he speeds out the door. “They (the customers) don’t call me until after they ‘fix’ it themselves.”

During a quiet moment, Terry turns back to me. “I like all the customers and all the relationships.

They come in here, and it’s kind of cool, because they’ve known me since I was a little boy. They treat me like family.”

All romanticizing aside, Terry allows that in addition to the family tradition, he has one major reason for spending up to 10 hours a day here.

“This is what I do to make a living,” he says. “Eating’s a hard habit to break.”

And, he adds, there never was any question he wanted to keep up the successful business begun by Bud: “My dad gave us a pretty good life.”

He reaches back to his desk and picks up a laminated funeral announcement for Regina “Missy” Peoples, who died this spring of heart woes that occurred after she already had beaten leukemia.

“We sure miss her. She was tough …. She knew where everything was.”

Then he smiles. “She wasn’t just an employee, she was a personal friend. All of us here are like family.”

Jonathon is not only “just like family.” He’s the real deal, Terry’s son. He’s also somewhere between a janitor, a bookkeeper and a customer-service rep.

In short, he does anything needed, including running the store when his pop’s gone fishing or perhaps scouting out real estate opportunities.

In fact, Jonathon’s the future of the store. The father of two children, Jonas 15, and Abby 12, says he never really doubted, even when working on his philosophy degree at MTSU, that “I kinda knew I would” spend life at the hardware store and overseeing the future of Bud’s Corner in general.

“The whole reason I’m here is because of my granddad. He was a hero, so it means a lot to me to be a part of this and keep things going,” Jonathon says.

“I spent a lot of time with him, and he passed on a lot of wisdom. Probably the biggest thing was ‘work hard, go to school and you can do whatever you want to do.’

“I’m doing what I want to do.” He smiles while scanning his store filled with implements of destruction and construction.

Grandpa Bud set the mood and manner that continues at this family business. “He was a very charismatic, very caring person.”

Jonathon sees those same qualities in his own father. “My dad has always treated people kindly and with respect,” he notes.

“We have a lot of the same faces who have been coming in for years and years, little old ladies come in and say they remember when it was an A&W and they’d get their root beer here.”

Course the revitalization of Buchanan Street, like so much of Nashville, is dependent on the contractors who need equipment and supplies. This store, Bud’s, is within a few blocks rather than miles of the north-side building boom.LG Refrigerator Repair in Mumbai

But Jonathon is looking beyond his own future and into what he hopes will be an endless existence for Bud’s Hardware.

“I hope it lasts beyond me,” he says. “I’ve got a daughter, and since she was little she said she wanted to run the store, so I hope to see it passed through generations.”

Terry is back at the cash register, checking out yet one more customer he knows by first name and whose father or grandfather probably knew old Bud.

A man steps in from the corner of 16th and Buchanan and asks Terry if he can loan him $5.

“I don’t loan out money anymore,” Terry says.

“You know me. You know I’m good for it,” says the customer. “And I’m working now.”

Terry smiles. “If you are working now, how come you need $5?”

The mayor of Bud’s Corner reaches into his pocket, then hands the man a fiver.

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