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Rating: "America, why are your libraries full of tears?" OR Dialogues of a Confused Mind in Search of Healing
"Ok, I would like to write a review"
"Great, but what do you want to review?"
"Well, there’s this song by The Brian Jonestown Massacre called "Reign On" and I listened to it the other day and I felt my body vibrating and my heart starting to cry, and it got inside me and doesn’t want to leave"
"Alright, since no one has reviewed "Bringin It All Back Home - Again" (the EP that contains the track) yet, go ahead"
"No, you don’t understand, the point is that I’m only interested in that track, which doesn’t really fit with the rest of the album, and then tonight I was sad and didn’t know what to do and couldn’t leave the house because of this damn illness, so I picked up a book by Thomas Wolfe - "You Can’t Go Home Again" - that I bought some time ago for 2 euros at a stall, in the original language, I don’t even know how it ended up there - oh! wonders of life - I had started it but then got discouraged and temporarily set it aside even though I was incredibly impressed by the way it’s written and I can’t understand how this guy has been almost completely forgotten!"
"So you want to review the book? I’m not understanding anything anymore!"
"Wait! Basically, I’m lying on the bed and feeling really blue, and I decide to start from the end of the book, so I read the entire final chapter "A Wind Is Rising, And The River Flows" and as I read it, I hear Miranda Lee Richards' voice singing
"The rose it’s self don’t cut
only its raging thorns
did you forget were you bleeding
petals of red
so fly high tell me
what does blue feel like
are stars really suns
won’t you come answer
through my candle light"
And then I thought it’s really curious, that BJM makes an album that drips America from every song, where they talk about bringing it all back home, mention Dylan, and cover Charles Manson ("Arkansas Revisited") and here I am with the only song in my mind that has little to do with America, which almost seems like it came from a Lisa Germano album, and meanwhile, I’m reading Thomas Wolfe reflecting on post-1929 America and Germany on the brink of World War II, and all his dreams as a man and artist and what he learned and his worries for the future and the choice to continue the struggle even though in the end nothing changes and he finally tells me that
"You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood, back home to romantic love, back home to a young man’s dream of glory and of fame, back home to exile, to escape to Europe and some foreign land, back home to lyricism, to singing just for singing’s sake, back home to aestheticism, to one’s youthful idea of "the artist" and the all-sufficiency of "art" and "beauty" and "love" [...] away from all the strife and conflict of the world, back home to the father you have lost and have been looking for, back home to someone who can help you, save you, ease the burden for you, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time - back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."
(Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again", Signet Book, 1966)
And I see this great picture of America, in perpetual motion, where Wolfe wanders with his papers under his arm - like Thoreau and Whitman before him, and like Kerouac after him - and he lets himself be intoxicated by the landscape and shares whisky with the hobos and somewhere Miranda sings "Save your angels some pain...oh Goodbye baby"
"But you can’t do this! It turns into a schizophrenic mess, where you want to talk about an album and a book and end up not reviewing either one properly!"
"Maybe you’re right, better to let it go, after all "8 ½" must have taught me something."
"Exactly. Maybe next time will be the right one..."
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