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17. The Natural Bridge (Part 3)
48 Plays10 months ago
The final installment of our deep dive into the second Silver Jews album.
David Berman recorded on Drag City records.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Humor
00:00:00
Speaker
we could start a Patreon and basically be like, if you pay us on a monthly basis, we will stop putting this podcast out.
Podcast Introduction and Album Discussion
00:00:17
Speaker
Well hey everybody, welcome to Candy Jail. I'm Brendan, I'm here with Robert, and this is part three of our deep dive into the Silver Jews album
00:00:28
Speaker
natural bridge. We have three tracks left. I believe inside the golden days of missing you was where we left off last episode. And we're going to pick up like no time has passed at all. And as always, thank you for being here.
Track Analysis: Albemarle Station
00:00:44
Speaker
Call me from Albemarle station if you can. Hope you find a concentration. So Brendan, Albemarle station track eight. What are your feelings, impressions, likes, dislikes, whatnot of this track?
00:01:15
Speaker
This is a song that musically I find rather un-compelling, if that's a word, compared to the rest of the tracks on the album. And I find his lyrics here so sort of abstruse that I find myself, you know that feeling when you read lyrics that are, the sense of them is not immediately obvious, but it's like you can,
00:01:44
Speaker
It's like putting your hand on the hood of an engine where you can feel the vibration and the power underneath your hand.
Lyrics Meaning and Album Structure
00:01:51
Speaker
And there are lyrics that give me that same sensation where I can feel the meaning kind of thrumming under the surface. I know it's waiting there for me to
00:02:00
Speaker
discovered or not discover it. I don't get that feeling from this song. And musically, it doesn't pull me into the extent that the other ones do. Either there's some interesting stuff in there, especially the magic shop and colonial Watts is a very evocative and intriguing line. But altogether, this is the closest thing I think for me on the natural bridge to a weak track.
00:02:30
Speaker
What about you? I think I concur. I don't want to get rid of any of the other songs. It'd be really hard to for me. I don't know how I feel about the. In terms of just like having strong feelings, I don't feel strongly one way or another about the right to remain silent. And I'm interested in just like as a.
00:02:55
Speaker
as a technique to have one track that is an instrumental in order to provide if it is in keeping with the Starlight Walker motivation, a kind of palate cleanser for subsequent songs. I just think it's an interesting idea whether or not that's what it accomplishes for me, I'm not sure.
00:03:20
Speaker
essentially a track of instrumentals that might be serving a kind of formal role in this in the structure of this album or an organizing principle. That really would be the only other one that I could come up with an argument for in terms of maybe subtracting. But yeah, I'm on the same page with you.
Berman's Lyrics and Narrative Threads
00:03:40
Speaker
Do you think once you once you introduce the idea early in our discussion of this album that sometimes Berman may be addressing his father
00:03:51
Speaker
Do you think this is one of those songs? Well, let me actually, if you don't mind, work through some of the lines that I'm going to argue are potentially narrative threads, which would ultimately feed back into my album about Berman's father, in large part thesis statement, if that's cool with you.
00:04:13
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, if you want to be all organized and shit. Yeah, bro. I know. I can't help it. It's a problem. It's a disease. A malady of, I don't know, hopefully not rigidity. So he has just, I think it's interesting as like tracking his
00:04:35
Speaker
recurring images and on some levels the things that he seems magnetized to either consciously or unconsciously or both you have the line i hope you find your concentration beneath the ceiling fan and i thought it was an interesting slight variation from the line in how to rent a room the opening track with i'm still here below the chandelier where they always used to read us our rights
00:05:01
Speaker
And certainly you have another chandelier reference in Room Games and Diamond Rain and Bright Flight. So anyway, there's something about being underneath fans, chandeliers, various things like this that he keeps returning to probably in both the poetry and the music.
00:05:21
Speaker
Did you notice that? Did you catch that? I did. And I, you know, I brought up on another episode recently, I brought up David Lynch and ceiling fans. And I know that I don't want to go too far in projecting that, but because certainly.
00:05:37
Speaker
Ceiling fans and chandeliers are not really a David Lynch thing in the way that ceiling fans are, but I feel like nobody who's ever seen the first run of Twin Peaks and especially Firewalk with me will ever be able to think of a ceiling fan in the same way. And there was a part of me that wondered if, you know, if Berman had seen those things and if they'd been burned on his brain and if this was a conscious or an unconscious reference in some way.
00:06:05
Speaker
That's an interesting point. I'm even thinking of the ceiling fan and the opening scene of Apocalypse Now with- Oh, there's that.
Cinematic and Cultural References in Lyrics
00:06:15
Speaker
There's that, too. Where he's having his moment.
00:06:18
Speaker
I guess that movie is him having one long moment in a way, but that's a pretty pronounced moment. Go ahead. I was just going to say that movie is Francis Ford Coppola having a moment, really. A lot of people having moments in that movie. Think about what's his name, Dennis Hopper, Jesus. I almost feel like he just got really high and was in the jungles of Vietnam just on accident, and Coppola was like, oh great, can you be in my movie?
00:06:47
Speaker
So okay, let's see, back to playing detective. He sings in Albemarle Station. We used to dance at the split level ranch.
00:06:58
Speaker
And I thought this line potentially links back up again with a line from the opening track, how to rent a room where he reads, or where he sings, excuse me. I should have checked the stable doors for the name of the siren dam. So clearly a stable isn't a ranch, but I think stables can be on ranches, can't they? So I sort of connected dots in that regard. Do you think that that's at least passably possible?
00:07:27
Speaker
Yes. And we did not talk very much at all about that sire and damn line, which I don't know that we need to get into that. We have talked, by the way, about the idea of going through every Silver Jews album and then sort of going through every single Silver Jews album again, because there's sort of an inexhaustible amount of things to analyze. I don't know of Berman's preoccupation here with ranches and
00:07:58
Speaker
stables and things like that is more of a, I think that the sire and damn reference is very specific in a different kind of way, but I will also acknowledge that the connection is quite possibly there.
American History and Culture in Lyrics
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah. And just to link back up with other Western Americana references, which I'm going to add to in our final two songs after Albemarle, but obviously you have the name of this track is Albemarle Station. So trains. Trains, horses, stables. We have a lot of imagery and I'm going to bite my tongue because there's more to come.
00:08:39
Speaker
that I think is at least situating us in that mythical, well trodden, pun intended space in North American lore, right? Romanticizations of our history or romanticizations of our culture, dominant culture at least, right? Yeah, and Berman loves to take, he loves to work with the same,
00:09:07
Speaker
sort of set of reference points, things that have been romanticized in the American consciousness, but he then likes to play with what those mythologized things actually mean or how they can be combined with each other. That revisionist, pastiche-loving, deconstructive, progressive, leftist piece of work, right?
00:09:31
Speaker
Well, I feel like Malcolm Gladwell has ruined the word revisionist for everybody now. What did he do with the word revisionist? Well, I believe his podcast is called Revisionist History, and it consists mainly of him getting things wrong, making idiotic deductions, and just generally continuing to pour gasoline on the dumpster fire that is his existence.
Hollywood and Shakespeare References
00:10:02
Speaker
So favorite line for me from this song, I pass an abandoned drive-in with Ivy growing over its screen. It's like I caught Hollywood sleeping asleep without the dreams and a super fans hot take on genius, which I liked and think is compelling is that he thinks asleep without dreams is of course a reference to death. And then he ties that to Shakespeare's Hamlet.
00:10:30
Speaker
Act 3, Scene 1, quote, for in that sleep of death, what dreams may come, such a famous line. There's also, according to this fan, a cynical commentary here on Hollywood, where aspiring cinephiles often go to pursue their ambition, which actually might have a lynch piece, just as a sidebar. But of course, there are no dreams to be found for a nobody in Hollywood.
00:10:56
Speaker
my other favorite line I'll hold off on just to give you a chance to respond to that. What do you think? Does that seem like there is a little Shakespeare wink going on? Maybe. That stanza I think was my favorite for a while and it's funny you brought it up because the last time I listened to this song was literally about an hour before we recorded and I was like, I don't know. That's a little bit
00:11:23
Speaker
It's not a bad line. It's maybe a little bit flimsier than some of his normal. It's fine. I don't like it as much as I used to. As far as the sleep and dream thing, as you said, that line from Hamlet is so famous that even people who have never heard of Shakespeare have probably internalized on some level that
00:11:51
Speaker
the whole thing where sleep is a metaphor for death and then dreams are a metaphor for afterlife and, you know, torture and hell and all that kind of thing. There's a metaphor for Malcolm Gladwell's Freakonomics. Did he write that one? No, Freakonomics. They're all the same to me, man. Yeah, no, they are. Freakonomics is another crackpot asshole. I hope that's his actual name, Dr. Crackpot Asshole, PhD. Well, there's an opportunity for
00:12:20
Speaker
a recurring segment on our show is to interview, bring in Dr. Crackpot Asshole and interview him. Actually, we should totally do that.
Recurring Themes and Artistic Connections
00:12:28
Speaker
One of us could play Dr. Crackpot Asshole. Anyway. I thought I have been this whole time. Now I'm offended. You offended Crackpot Asshole. I used to get litigious. Yeah, the Crackpot Assholes always do. I feel like that Hamlet
00:12:51
Speaker
metaphor has just been so deeply absorbed by society that you can make Shakespeare references without even realizing you're making Shakespeare references. So yeah, it's possible. I don't know how deliberate it is. Good point. Well, point taken.
00:13:08
Speaker
My other favorite line, which you liked, was a magic shop and colonial watch. Something gets pushed by the wind. David Berman also used this phrase, and I found this from another superfan on Genius in his poem, Coral Gables. One of the poems found in his book, Actual Air. Brendan, would you like to read this stanza for us? Absolutely. So this is from Coral Gables.
00:13:37
Speaker
She wore a dress of voting booth curtains to a party at the coroner's split level ranch. As she dashed up the court's pebble lane, a bell pushed by the wind rang. That to me almost reads as the final version of what he was fucking around with in Albemarle Station. Like he had more time to spend with some of this stuff and that's what he landed on.
Track Analysis: Frontier Index
00:14:06
Speaker
Did actual air come out before natural bridge? No. After. You sure? 99. Yeah. Okay. I think you're right. And you know what? In a way you have it all, you have the split level ranch reference. You have, um, the curtains, curtains move in the wind from how to rent a room. Uh, there's a lot in here actually. Right. And there's even more than that because I would bet a lot.
00:14:33
Speaker
that that is also a wink to the Carol Burnett Show, because Carol Burnett Show did a skit, which Berman was maybe the right generation to have been aware of, where it's a parody of Gone with the Wind, wherein Gone with the Wind scarlet needs to make a dress, but she doesn't have any fabric available, so she makes a dress out of the curtains in the plantation house and in
00:14:59
Speaker
the Carol Burnett Show's version, Scarlett O'Hara makes a dress out of the curtains and she leaves the curtain rod in it. So she comes down the stairs with this giant curtain rod in her dress. It's a kind of a famous skit. And I'm sure when he says she wore a dress made of voting booth curtains, that he's referencing that. And that's one of the reasons that it can be so hard to tease apart all of the Berman references because he's nodding at so many things at the same time.
00:15:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good point. Nice, good catch. Okay. Number nine, moving on, unless you have final thoughts with this song. No, I think we can move on to the frontier index. Of all the people I knew, I always looked up to you.
00:15:59
Speaker
And after millions of years of crime, the sun still shines and shines. Look a horse, of course. So, general thoughts, impressions, likes, dislikes, whatever you'd like to share.
00:16:24
Speaker
Well, the one thing that always stands out to me about this song is that it's built around corny jokes. The first one is the robot walking into the bar, and the second one is the teenager who wants his dad to buy him a car. And these are probably what we would now call dad jokes. And they're not bad jokes, but like I said, they're a little bit on the
00:16:54
Speaker
you know, it's a little bit of an eye roll aspect to them. And he ends the song, let me quote the final lines here. When I was younger, I was a cobra. In every case, I wanted to be cool. Now that I'm older, and subspace is colder, I just want to say something true. And to me, that is his
00:17:22
Speaker
We've talked on here before about how by the time he got to Purple Mountains many years later, he was making a point to not be evasive or abstruse, but to be as clear as he could be. And to me, that's a reference to that same desire, the desire to say something true and to say something that is understandable.
Lyrical Themes of Truth and Theology
00:17:43
Speaker
And to me, there's a connection between that wish and the fact that there are two dad jokes.
00:17:52
Speaker
in this song, but what the truth is that he's getting at in those dad jokes I think is very much open for discussion. So where do you want to start with this one? Do you want to start with the title? Do you want to start with something specific in the lyrics?
00:18:10
Speaker
Well, I did wind up putting quite a bit of effort into this song because I do think it's packed with quite a bit. So if you don't mind, I'm going to go through it as I've laid it out, mapped it out, and link back up with some of the comments you just made because they definitely echo and rhyme with some of my own impressions.
00:18:32
Speaker
So it opens with, I think, a fantastic opening line. Of all the people I knew, I always looked up to you. And after millions of years of crime, the sun still shines and shines. I think you have potentially two, there might be more, but I'm going to float out that there's two big possible interpretations of this line, with perhaps one ultimately being more persuasive than the other.
00:18:59
Speaker
So here I'm thinking specifically about who the you is referring to. I can see an argument that it's referring to God himself, probably the most convincing or
00:19:12
Speaker
his father, perhaps slightly less convincing, but given the opening song and general subjective context, I think it works. But furthermore, God is often referred to as the father. So in some ways, a fusion of the ultimate father with DCB's biological father also works for me.
00:19:33
Speaker
Regardless of who the U is in truth referring to, we have another biblically tinged stanza if biblically tinged. We mean a stanza that immediately confronts us with an ethical dilemma of the theological variety.
00:19:49
Speaker
namely, why has God allowed millions of years of crime to ceaselessly persist, and that in spite of this, the sun still shines and shines? In other words, I don't think Berman is asking the question of whether or not God exists. That question is implicitly answered in the line's framing. I always looked up to you, meaning him, meaning God.
00:20:14
Speaker
So again, God's existence is presupposed, and so the real question again is, why has God allowed all of this horror to happen on His watch? And from there, we enter into new question bifurcation such as, did God create us, but then leave us be?
00:20:32
Speaker
Is God leaving us be until He decides not to leave us be? Are we in control of our actions, or is God in control of our actions? And depending on how we answer any of those questions, we will once again find ourselves with yet another fresh round of questions that go on and on ad infinitum. The Buddha would discount these sorts of questions offhand due to their fundamental unanswerability.
00:20:59
Speaker
He would simply refer to them as speculations that do not lead to edification. But Berman is not a Buddhist. He's a practicing Jew and therefore is presupposing the existence of God, which in turn leads to the above-mentioned pursuit of an infinite series of infinitely bifurcating theological questions. If we really want to tie the standard to something all too familiar, is this not in essence
00:21:25
Speaker
a kind of reformulation of Job and the central spiritual question linked to Job's story, namely, why do bad things happen to good people and not just to good people, but to objectively faithful and dutiful religious adherents? Anyway, what do you think about that just general rough and tumble take on that opening line? I think that's an absolutely convincing reading of that.
00:21:56
Speaker
I am absolutely open to seeing it as Berman speaking to God and addressing, trying to come up with some sort of theodicy that is an explanation for a way to reconcile the existence of a benevolent God with the evil that exists in the world.
00:22:17
Speaker
Beautiful. So then back to references, right? Look a horse, of course. Pop quiz. Do you happen to know what that's referencing? I'm going to take that as a no. So look, you're looking it up.
00:22:34
Speaker
No, sorry, my window disappeared and I couldn't even unmute myself because I couldn't find the window. Sorry about that. No problem. I mean, if you ask me what that's a reference to, the very first thing that's going to come to my mind is this theme song to Mr. Ed. That's it.
00:22:51
Speaker
That is the theme song. So I take that as an on the nose reference to that show. You know it better than I do, although I think I did watch a little bit of that as a kid, probably on like the Nick at night stuff. It was on Nick at night. Yeah. I remember that. So again, right? I just think it further reinforces Berman's links to the Western genre and Western Americana.
Western Americana and Social Commentary
00:23:14
Speaker
train stations, stables, and ranches. All these images are recurring visuals that make up Western iconography and mythology. And while we're at it, the name of the song is, as you brought up, what's the name? Frontier Index. So we have the final frontier of Star Trek, actually. And Space is obviously referenced in this song. And so I do think he is being intentional again with the title and these references
00:23:43
Speaker
in terms of situating us in a particular cultural context, mythical context. The jokes. So the robot walks into a bar, orders a drink, lays down a bill. Bartender says, hey, we don't serve robots. And the robot says, oh, but someday you will. Aside in my mind from being both genuinely funny, and even if it is a dad joke, I find it quite beautiful,
00:24:10
Speaker
You have another recurring image for Berman, which is robots. So he's referencing robots in the song Send in the Clouds from American Water. Windex tears flow down the robot's face. He never felt a mother's embrace. He also references robots on at least one other occasion in a poem from actual air.
00:24:30
Speaker
And then again, the personification of inanimate objects. I remember the snowman poem, right? There's all kinds of little things like that that he seems to keep bringing in, right? Any thoughts before I keep going? Not really. I mean, the robot joke is
00:24:52
Speaker
hinges upon on serve, serve in the sense of attend to in a bar and serve in the sense of become the servant of. And it's obviously a reference to a dystopian future in which our robot overlords have finally taken over.
00:25:12
Speaker
or the singularity has arrived, or they didn't get to Dyson's house to kill him in time, etc. I don't know if there's a thematic connection to those ideas in a way that I can see yet. I'm sure there is one, but I can't see it yet.
00:25:35
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's good. And I actually never really thought about the serving as like, you will not just be serving me drinks, you will be serving me like I will, you will be subordinated to me. That's good, man. That's good.
00:25:49
Speaker
A genius lyric contributor, Rhubarb, a superfan, made this conjecture within the context of the song. Perhaps we can see the robot as a metaphor for the ostracized groups Berman discusses. And I thought, I'm not tracking that he's explicitly discussing ostracized groups in the song, but I could see the robot serving as kind of like a catch-all for any ostracized group that's faced discrimination.
00:26:19
Speaker
Um, but do you, did you get a beat on like ostracized groups being referenced in the song? That one didn't, I couldn't connect a dot there with that comment. No. Okay. But definitely that just in a general sense, right? Discrimination I think is there in that joke. Yeah, definitely.
00:26:40
Speaker
Alright, so then we get and I think this is a really important narrative detective style clue again. So we get another important reference to stars bumper stickers talk to him. So the line is
00:26:56
Speaker
Prison's a good time for some. Many people get caught with a gun. This trucker says it's good to be free. Says he knows lots of folks who agree. Bumper stickers is the line. Talk to him. Talk to the trucker. Say, don't let the stars get in your eyes.
00:27:15
Speaker
So now we have, from Ballad of Reverend War character, the stars don't shine upon us. We're in the way of their light. Now with this line in the penultimate track from the perspective of a trucker, he's saying, from a bumper sticker that reads, don't let the stars get in your eyes.
Star Imagery and Artistic Paradoxes
00:27:35
Speaker
In the former line, I feel it's constructed in such a way, as we discussed in maybe our first episode,
00:27:43
Speaker
that maybe were so contemptible, it's an absurd mistake to assume that stars would ever dignify the human animal by shining upon beasts as beastly as humans. In the latter line, it could almost be read again as a kind of admonition or a warning.
00:28:04
Speaker
In this instance, humans are no longer beneath having stars shine upon us. We are simply or at least implicitly risking the possibility of being blinded if we look up at the stars. So here we are once again with the tension of sight and blindness and with the stars themselves serving as sources of light in this case to be avoided.
00:28:28
Speaker
So I might be stretching a little with it being a warning about being blinded, but it's definitely saying don't, right? Don't let it get in your eyes. Well, there's definitely a progression here from the first star reference.
00:28:46
Speaker
in Reverend War character to the star reference here to the final star reference in Pretty Eyes where we're going we're being presented with three different ways of conceiving of stars and how we want to unpack each of those three I think is open to some debate but I think that he is deliberately playing with possible ways of conceiving of stars and what they represent.
00:29:12
Speaker
Fair enough. I have my bombshell interpretation that requires the final song to tie it all up, so that's fair. Let's see if I can convince you.
00:29:23
Speaker
Um, second joke, funny, just works. There's a JC reference, of course. Um, and then the final killer stanza that you brought up and you felt was poignant and significant. When I was younger, I was a Cobra and every since I wanted to be cool. Now that I'm older and subspace is colder. I just want to say something true.
00:29:46
Speaker
I think just adding to what you've already shared, it has a wonderful book-endy resonance with the line from the song Room Gains and Diamond Rain from the album Tanglewood Numbers where he sings, you can make lies real. You can make me feel like drinking wine all afternoon.
00:30:06
Speaker
Again, a master lyricist lands on a beautiful paradox. Let me try to stitch both lines into a synthetic statement. Sometimes the only way to say something true is when you lie. In other words, sometimes you need to dive headfirst into fiction or the world of make-believe in order to actually and paradoxically get at the truth.
00:30:28
Speaker
There is certainly a long list of world-class artists who arrived at similar conclusions. Here I'm thinking of Mark Twain's opening epigraph to which novel was it, man? Do you remember? I was too lazy to look it up, but he has one that's explicitly dealing with fiction being the only vehicle by which to get at truth.
00:30:50
Speaker
I don't remember, I just remember the little introductory blurb to Adventures of Huck Finn where he makes the joke about all the characters trying to sound the same and failing at it. I know roughly what you're talking about.
00:31:06
Speaker
It's somewhere in there, I swear, but don't, I'm not going to stake my life on it. But then you have the opening paragraph to Chao Shui-Chin's, not the opening paragraph, the opening epigraph or nearly the opening epigraph of Chao Shui-Chin's masterpiece, Dream of the Red Chamber, the Chinese novelist, incredible multi-volume work, or Lady Murasaki's Japanese masterpiece, The Tale of Genji.
00:31:31
Speaker
that's really preoccupied with that theme. But further, and this comes from Eugene V on Genius. We love all Jews, super fans, so therefore we love you, Eugene V.
00:31:44
Speaker
But he wrote, this line is the crux of Berman's mission, which I think tracks with what you said. In one of his last interviews, he made a comment to this effect. Truth is the only antidote to pain and misery, or if not an antidote, then a response.
00:32:03
Speaker
And I think that's absolutely right. Furthermore, I thought this was interesting, dude. I found out recently while walking with one of my friend tours, which is a term I've coined in which friend and mentor is combined into one beautifully synthetic
00:32:19
Speaker
new word, frentor, that the word medicine in ancient Greek is the exact same word used for poison. So I pulled this off of NYU's website as they defined it. In ancient Greek, the word for drug is pharmacon, a secular or magical potion that can heal or harm the body.
00:32:40
Speaker
Like the modern English drug, it is a word for both medicine and poison a site of deep desire and divisive social and political discourse. So I want to, you know, I sort of.
00:32:52
Speaker
was freely associating and just thought that in effect, this means that medicine and poison can be understood in some regard as being one in the same thing, or at the very least emerging from one in the same source. This I feel has important ramifications in the realm of artistic production, and perhaps more specifically, the DCB mission, so to speak. If the antidote or medicine to pain and misery is creating art that gets at the truth,
00:33:20
Speaker
It is also paradoxically and perhaps tragically also the poison. Understood in this way, truth is both the medicine and the poison for the malady of angst and consequently contains the seeds of both one's salvation and one's destruction. How's that for the ultimate trap?
00:33:40
Speaker
a damned if you do, damned if you don't sort of predicament, is it not? Does this potentially feed back into the trapped inside the song reference in New Orleans and songs that build little rooms in time and snow is falling in Manhattan? What do you think, man? Yeah, I think that's accurate. I think that pretty neatly sums up certain aspects of how I see the world. I want to
00:34:07
Speaker
get at the truth of everything, no matter how ugly it is, and then I find the ugly truth, and then I'm depressed, or I'm angry, or I'm anxious, because I know the truth. And it is a kind of truly impossible conundrum, where, you know, I think I've said before, I don't know if I've said it quite this way, in my experience,
00:34:37
Speaker
A lot of people are not interested in the truth. They're really not. A lot of people would rather set themselves on fire than actually consider what might be true. And it's all well and good for me to make a lot of noises about how much I care about the truth, but I don't know how different I really am.
00:35:00
Speaker
It's not as though I've ever really had to sacrifice anything in order to get at the truth as far as I know, right? But I do know that for every time in my life I've found the truth and greeted it with a sense of relief and happiness, there's another time in my life that I feel like I've arrived at truth and have immediately felt worse about everything in every conceivable way.
00:35:23
Speaker
And yeah, I feel very similarly and I would even extend that to a late love in my, not old age, but just late in my development was history. And even though I'm not sure it's completely fair to frame it in one genre and one genre only, but I'm pretty inclined, man, after all of this reading of history.
00:35:50
Speaker
to conclude that it's a fundamentally tragic subject. And with all of the complications that swirl around what constitutes truth in the realm of history and how you know you're in pursuit of it or are landing on it or at least can defend the narratives that are being presented, right? That's all interesting stuff to me, but I feel like it's overwhelmingly tragic.
00:36:20
Speaker
most of its content and therefore I'm inclined to view the discipline itself as a kind of tragic discipline. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So what are your feelings about this final song?
Emotional Impact of Pretty Eyes
00:36:36
Speaker
Everybody wants perspective from a hill but everybody's wants
00:36:49
Speaker
Can't make it past the windowsill I can see you in your room at night Pictures on your walls Little forest scenes in high school halloween's But they don't come to you They don't come to you at all All houses stream blueprints
00:37:18
Speaker
our houses dream so hard outside you can see my shoe prints i've been dreaming in your yard one of these days these days will end i have friends who live in st paul minnesota and from time to time i go out and stay with them and
00:37:47
Speaker
more than once this has happened to me where I've
00:37:52
Speaker
gone out mid-morning and driven down the street in their neighborhood to get a cup of coffee. And for whatever reason, put this song on. I went to the picture of a bright winter day in Minnesota with blue sky and the glistening black asphalt with snow piled up all around it. And beautiful, beautiful day. And, you know, 1030.
00:38:22
Speaker
in the morning and this song playing and I'm driving down this suburban street in St. Paul, trying not to cry listening to this song. It is maybe my favorite silver juice song. I don't know. Ask me in five minutes. I'll probably give you a different answer kind of a thing. But this song is just a miracle.
00:38:49
Speaker
I kind of want to start there and we can break it apart a little bit, but I don't think that any analysis that we do can ever, we could never put the parts back together to make the whole in the way that the song itself makes you feel.
00:39:10
Speaker
I won't get yet to my favorite lines, but this song may be more than any other song. I think looking back may be the song that made me a Silver Jews fan. That's cool to hear. That's cool to hear that it came off of the natural bridge and not
00:39:30
Speaker
the sort of go-to, which is fine as well, but mine was, I mean, my first exposure as we discussed was Starlight Walker, but really first Fall In Love album was the more conventional Fall In Love album, American Water. So that's cool that it was off of Natural Bridge and it was this song for you. Just to re-mind ourselves and listeners of the struggle involved in really
00:39:59
Speaker
getting to this album, right? He bailed on the recording with Malcomus and Nastanovich for reasons that we don't fully understand, and that's fine. Seemed like he wanted to regroup and make sure that it was clear that it was his band, right, and his project, and that it was definitely not a pavement side project. But that must have been painful.
00:40:26
Speaker
And then the sleeplessness and the agony from what I read leading up to the recording of this one with a different band was rough. And then actually recording it was rough. I mean, the first couple of songs, two, three, I think went okay. And then it was really bad. He struggled profoundly. And so by the time he gets to the end of the album, right, I kind of do see it as the end of a,
00:40:54
Speaker
really tough journey, both in the recording of this album itself, but even the stuff that happened preceding it. And therefore, I think it's worth noting as we discussed, I think at some point in one of our earlier episodes attached to this three-parter, that this is one that happened pretty easily for him, and that the bandmates were sort of in awe of this one coming out pretty much clean in one take.
00:41:22
Speaker
maybe it was too, but it was compared to all the others struggling, right? For that to happen I think is interesting and maybe speaks to something important. Yeah, it does have a feel maybe of kind of a breakthrough that as great as songs like New Orleans or trains across the sea are and we've played them and we've talked about them, I've never heard anything like
00:41:50
Speaker
Pretty Eyes, which is considering that the song basically consists of open chords and piano is saying a hell of a lot. But it's just it may be one of those moments where he had a breakthrough and he pushed himself to the next level or all of the work that he'd done that was so painful for him.
00:42:15
Speaker
had its momentary payoff in all of this pouring out in a way that may sound effortless when you say one or two takes but was really accumulated mastery finally finding its outlet. I like that yeah and I don't know if this is fair because I as I was about to blurt out uh what I'm about to blurt out I thought huh
00:42:38
Speaker
ballad of a reverend war character is in terms of its arrangement or execution pretty minimal too. But I think there's an argument that this is maybe like the first song where it's pretty much just David Berman singing with his guitar. Like as you pointed out there is the piano and a couple flourishes but
00:43:01
Speaker
You get, I think it's him in front of a mic with a guitar strumming, singing, it all is working for him. And there's no Malcomus or anyone else to be found. And maybe that's another like reason why this was a breakthrough, maybe.
00:43:19
Speaker
Anyway, yeah. Any other thoughts before I jump into my exegesis? No, go ahead and jump in. So opening line, or excuse me, not opening line, but opening stanza, he sings
00:43:40
Speaker
I can see you in your room at night, pictures on your walls, little forest scenes and high school Halloween, but they don't come to you. They don't come to you at all. And then he sings, all houses dream in blueprints, all houses dream so hard. Outside you can see my shoe prints I've been dreaming in your yard.
Symbolism and Mundane Rituals
00:44:04
Speaker
houses, blueprints, returns us associatively to the line in New Orleans. There is a house in New Orleans and then in Starlight Walker. Excuse me, that one's from Starlight Walker, but then he also sang in self-ignition the drag city compilation album titled Living Bridge. I woke up in a house I could understand.
00:44:30
Speaker
Then if we jump back to Natural Bridge, he sings in pet politics, I could see through the sleeve of her blouse, the plans of her architect lover, the tattoo of a boarded up house and ink door that belonged to another. So sticking exclusively with Natural Bridge only house references, this line again in pet politics, the narrator in that song sees a house.
00:44:55
Speaker
And I suppose muses over the plans of her architect lover. What are plans of an architect, if not blueprints? Now in pretty eyes, the narrator sings, all houses dream in blueprints, all houses dream so hard. Okay, blueprint reference number two, check. Then the line, outside you can see my shoe prints, I've been dreaming in your yard. The narrator is still outside the house.
00:45:25
Speaker
Presumably it seems of someone he loves or pines after. The tattoo of a boarded up house in pet politics has an inked door that belonged to another.
00:45:37
Speaker
I take this to mean that the eye who's observing the woman's tattoo and pet politics recognizes the door is not meant for him, but for another. In other words, he is barred from entry standing outside it, so to speak. Well, what is the narrator doing in pretty eyes? He's standing outside a house barred from entry, so to speak, once again. How's that land with you, man? Do you think there is? It works?
00:46:06
Speaker
I think it totally works. Okay, so then he sings, one of these days, these days will end, a kitchen window, the light will bend, you'll be carving a pumpkin with a knife when someone at the table says that's not what I call a life. Rhubarb on Genius once again has an interesting take on the pumpkin. Pumpkins also get referenced at different points throughout his music.
00:46:31
Speaker
He writes, the subject of the song has photos from Halloween when they were young and had their life ahead of them. This is, of course, referring to the opening stanza pictures on your wall, little forest scenes in high school Halloween. This juxtaposes the later image when in their midlife they are, quote, carving a pumpkin with a knife, wondering how they allowed life to pass them by.
00:46:56
Speaker
Now, I'm not sure I can wrap my head around this interpretation, but it's an interesting connection at the very least that he connected the pumpkin with the Halloween reference in the opening stanza. Do you have any thoughts on that before we move on? Because I never caught that until the very least that there is a dot connecting Halloween to pumpkins. But I don't know if it betrays or reveals a deeper narrative thread.
00:47:24
Speaker
I don't know that there's a deeper narrative so much as I've always heard it as sitting and carving a pumpkin is one of those mundane but celebratory things that we do once a year. I just did it a few days ago with my girlfriend and her children. We all sat around and carved pumpkins. If you look at all of them and say, this is not what I call a life,
00:47:49
Speaker
Well, her teenage daughter was basically playing that role for us. I felt like that role was spoken for at the table. But the idea that you're doing something that is, it's a special thing to do, but it's also an incredibly mundane and meaningless thing to do. And one of these days, you're going to be doing something like that, and your life is going to end. And
00:48:15
Speaker
you're suddenly going to take stock of the meaninglessness of everything that you've accomplished. And in typical Berman fashion, this is also a crocodile Dundee reference, of course. I mean, not like he's referring us to the movie Crocodile Dundee in the hopes that we will consider the thematic content of that movie, but it's a riff on, you call that a knife. And because he's so often when Berman is at his best, he takes these
00:48:45
Speaker
sort of dizzying leaps at corny pop culture humor that often succeed so spectacularly. This is an incredibly sad song. There's so much pain in this song. Even, I don't know what I'm trying to say here exactly, except that he doesn't need to make that corny, you call that a knife reference in this
00:49:15
Speaker
scene that he's building for us and yet he does and somehow the song is better for it. Yeah. Well, I never caught the Crocodile Dundee reference, but I love that how you've
00:49:28
Speaker
made sense of it as not just another reference, but actually getting at something pretty profound, what he's playing with there. So next line that I thought was, I mean, it's on the whole thing. It's like, what are you supposed to do here? I'm not saying this line's better or worse than another, just this is what I'm latching on to next.
00:49:53
Speaker
The elephants are so ashamed of their size, hosing them down, I tell them, you got pretty eyes. Out in the backyard, I used to make like I was a cowboy. I'd set my dog before a hoop and say, now boy, now boy. I want to hear your take on this before I give you my commentary. The elephants line is,
00:50:19
Speaker
one of the greatest things he ever wrote, one of the greatest lines that anyone has ever written, I feel myself tearing up sometimes just when I think of that line, the elephants are so ashamed of their size, hosing them down, I tell them you've got pretty eyes. That's just fucking astonishing, man. And to go from that then to the
00:50:44
Speaker
the line about the dog and the hoop and pretending to be a cowboy, that to me is failed dreams. That is childhood innocence, childhood dreams, and ultimate futility, I guess, of those things. And I think we talked a little bit on here about Berman being a dog person. And I think if you are a dog person, which I'm a dog person, I don't know that you are,
00:51:13
Speaker
I don't think you dislike dogs. I don't know if you're a dog person though. I think I consider myself a dog person. Okay, because I would say for a dog person, there's something incredibly poignant about dogs where it's kind of like you're bypassing all the circuitry that normally exists between you and empathy for another human being. I'm one of those people where it's
00:51:39
Speaker
it's harder for me to read a scene in a book where a dog is tortured than a scene where a person is tortured because somehow it's cutting through something and getting to me directly. And I think Berman being a dog person might've had that same quirk to his personality. And so even the image of him standing in a backyard
00:52:06
Speaker
Pretending to be a cowboy and then making his dog jump through a hoop. There's something pathetic about it. And by pathetic, I mean full of pathos. Beyond that though, I don't know that I have anything useful to say. What do you have to say about that?
Empathy and Self-Perception Through Metaphors
00:52:29
Speaker
I mean, I think it's interesting that the narrator is whoever's singing whoever this character is, whether it's David himself or some character that's been sort of inserted throughout the whole album, if we're
00:52:43
Speaker
adhering to the possibility that there is a narrative going on, but the narrator is now hosing elephants down. So one of my questions is, where are we exactly? But before we get there, he's hosing elephants down and unlike humans who arrogantly puff up their chests like world historical assholes,
00:53:04
Speaker
to use the phrase that Berman used for his father, the elephants are ashamed of their size, which makes me think of Margarita's at the mall where he sings, drawing up all my findings and I warn you they are candid. My every day begins with reminders I've been stranded on this planet where I've landed, meet these gray and as granite skies, a place I wake up blushing because I'm ashamed to be alive.
00:53:32
Speaker
In much the same way the elephant is ashamed of his size in Natural Bridge, Berman himself is ashamed to be alive in Purple Mountains. Anywho, I think the narrator soothes the elephant's sense of shame by telling it it's got pretty eyes. And so I'm with you. I think we essentially got at a similar thing from different language, which is that there's just tremendous pathos and empathy.
00:54:00
Speaker
in that line and what's going on there. An interesting aside for me just as kind of a rhetorical question is what does one tell to sue the human who's ashamed to be alive? Do you tell them they've got pretty eyes too? I think it's an interesting salve of sorts. Thinking about the elephants, I always find myself wondering if we are meant to imagine the elephant's understanding.
00:54:30
Speaker
In other words, when the narrator tells the elephants they have pretty eyes, is that for him or is that for them? I don't think that's an answerable question and I don't think where we are, I don't think we're anywhere in particular. I think that it's a metaphor that works without having to be grounded in a specific narrative location.
00:54:53
Speaker
Yes. But the idea of an elephant being ashamed of what we would consider maybe the most admirable characteristic an elephant has is its size. That's why we are in awe of elephants. The idea that the thing that we most value elephants for in some sense that they would be ashamed of is already a lovely idea to play with. And then
00:55:20
Speaker
hosing them down. Well, that's what you do with elephants if you're a person and you're interacting with them. But the fact that it's so utilitarian, it's such a utilitarian thing to do, it's like the equivalent of helping an old person who can't bathe themselves anymore. But then telling them you have pretty eyes, are we meant to understand that the elephant is in fact
00:55:44
Speaker
assuaged by that, or is it in fact a human being speaking to a dumb beast, and the only thing the human being can do is make themselves feel better? Yeah, that's good. And I could even read a kind of puncturing of the frontier myth again, because this is anti John Wayne shit.
Vulnerability and Love in Lyrics
00:56:04
Speaker
You know, the elephant is ashamed of its size, whereas the John Wayne characters are always extremely proud of their size. And so there's an anti macho, anti machismo going on here that I think does work against the normal in quotes or the classical conception of tough guy cowboy bullshit.
00:56:25
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, and I think that the deepest sense of it I've always gotten is when you are insecure about who you are, when you hate yourself, when you struggle with self-loathing and self-doubt, often what you may despise most in yourself is one of the characteristics that other people actually love about you.
00:56:50
Speaker
Because self-hatred often comes with such a skewing of perspective, and then to try to encourage someone who is full of self-hatred is very, very hard. And if you are yourself struggling with self-hatred or self-doubt, to receive compliments is extremely hard. And I think we've all been in situations where
00:57:16
Speaker
We've been on one side of the other of that dynamic. Either someone is trying to make us feel better about ourselves, or we are trying to make someone else feel better about themselves. And it seems like there's this uncrossable gulf sometimes. And ultimately, this is not a line about elephants at all. It's a line about people, I think, and the difficulty of giving and receiving love.
00:57:39
Speaker
I think that tracks and I also think it's very astute in that he's saying it to an elephant. And so far as I know, I mean, maybe my cat knows what I'm saying, but not really. And so it is sort of like he's saying it to himself more than he's saying it to the elephant. It's an interesting, that's a really interesting insight. Your cat spends so much time outside because he can't stand to hear you talk about Walter Benjamin anymore. Yeah, basically. I don't blame him.
00:58:08
Speaker
So next line when the governor's heart fails, not next line, but.
Political and Civic Imagery
00:58:12
Speaker
Well, I guess it is the next line in this song, but the, the 1 that I really wanted to discuss when the governor's heart fails, the state bird falls from his branch icicles on hell's higher hills.
00:58:26
Speaker
Meanwhile, back home at the ranch, I still get up early in the morning and I never knew a better place. What's your feeling before I give you the exegesis on that line? Governors, oddly enough, Berman has a poem called Governors on Psalm and Acts. Civic imagery is another thing he has a preoccupation with, and I think that he was a little bit
00:58:54
Speaker
preoccupied with the symbolism of state power and especially sort of the middle tier state power that someone like a governor might represent where they are august figures but kind of meaningless figure heads at the same time. So obviously here there's been a crisis of state, leadership has failed, the governor has died, and
00:59:21
Speaker
Berman is profoundly unconcerned with that. He's happy tending his garden as it were back at the ranch. And yet the power of the governor dying is so intense that the state bird just keels over. And also there's the reference to hell freezing over. So not only is the state bird falling from its perch, but on some level the unthinkable has happened because hell is frozen over. Right.
00:59:50
Speaker
And again, right, just the deliciousness of being able to, I agree with you that this is a profoundly sad song, but for this profound sadness and melancholy to co-mingle with humor. He's doing it and to me it lands and makes it all the better.
01:00:09
Speaker
So I just said somewhat reminiscent of the line from the song Time Will Break the World from the album Bright Flight. This is what he sings on that. The icicles are dripping like the whole house is weeping on an evil little car with gull wing doors.
01:00:26
Speaker
a song I think most certainly about Berman's dad. And he goes on to sing, I have no idea what drives you mister, but I've killed you in my mind so many times before from that same song. And I'm just going, come on. I mean, this has to be, you know who.
01:00:43
Speaker
So while reading Richard Slotkin's excellent book, Gunfighter Nation, which I referenced in a previous recording for this multi-parter, he traces the origins and transformations of the American frontier and the mythology that's been built up around it. And he begins his three-volume magisterial tone by analyzing the frontier myth as it's expressed and codified and reinforced in North American literature of both the popular
01:01:11
Speaker
and the quote-unquote serious varieties. And until eventually his final volume we get to the birth of the cinematic medium and with it the western cinematic genre.
Western Tropes and Star Imagery
01:01:24
Speaker
Completely serendipitously while reading Slatkin's book, my eye reached a subsection titled Meanwhile Back Home at the Ranch.
01:01:34
Speaker
being a child of the 90s, rather than the 30s or 40s or 50s, I could infer that this was some kind of genre trope, but needed to confirm. And lo and behold, it was. Do you happen to know what it's referencing? Yeah, it's either bonanza or gun smoke. I don't remember which one.
01:01:55
Speaker
So I think it actually shows up in multiple Western TV shows, but Gunsmoke definitely. So for example, this is what I got from Wikipedia. I know Brendan were more scholarly than this is beneath at least you, but maybe not me. And I was lazy. So Wikipedia had this to say,
01:02:20
Speaker
TV shows use it to indicate a segue from one scene to another, but there is often more to this than meets the eye. The expression originated as a stock subtitle in the silent movies, and at first the reference to the ranch was literal.
01:02:36
Speaker
Later, as the phrase became a cliche, it was used more and more loosely and with a growing sense of mockery or levity, often with a vague focus. In this manifestation, the phrase came into common use in unrelated contexts. So again, another nod to Western genre pop culture. This also made me think, again, back to hosing down the elephant and telling the dog to jump through the hoop.
01:03:00
Speaker
With those lines, the image of a circus comes to mind, which again has a potential historical linkage in this instance to the Wild West shows of the late 19th century, where actual historical figures from the quote unquote Indian Wars such as Sitting Bull and soldiers formerly under, for instance, Custer's command, participated in a kind of live action mythologization of both the Indian Wars
01:03:27
Speaker
and the quote closing of the Western frontier unquote this is just me writing but I'm putting it in quotes because yeah this stuff is is
01:03:38
Speaker
Anyway, as seen through the ideological lens of the Frederick Jackson Turner conceptions of civilizational progress, again, in quotes, right? I think we can read Manifest Destiny into that kind of progress. So meanwhile, back home at the ranch can also, as its reference, double as both a narrative segue or in movie speak, a cut.
01:04:01
Speaker
So in this case to a literal ranch. So I think he might be actually doing both at the same time. Any thoughts before I keep moving with what I did with that? No, I think you're right. And I also want to just mention in passing that I think he's playing with two meetings of ranch at the same time because
01:04:21
Speaker
a ranch house is now an architectural style that was named for the way that people would have built a house on a ranch, but is now divorced from that, right? You could live in a ranch house in the suburbs. And so I think at times he is talking about a ranch house as part of his preoccupation with homes and domestic spaces. And then other times he's extending that in a more literal sense to be referring to an actual ranch.
01:04:49
Speaker
Yeah, good. I like that. So remember, should have checked the stable doors for the name of the siren dam, track one, how to rent a room. Then we used to dance at the split level ranch, track eight, Albemarle station. And now meanwhile, back home at the ranch, have we returned back to the ranch from track one, next stanza.
01:05:13
Speaker
I believe the stars of the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us to save us look in the sky they're driving from heaven into our eyes the final words are so hard to devise I promise I'll always remember your pretty eyes your pretty eyes stars recap real quick
01:05:33
Speaker
Ballad of Reverend War character. The stars don't shine upon us. We're in the way of their light. Frontier Index. Bumper stickers talk to a trucker. Don't let the stars get in your eyes. Whatever those stars are doing, the structure is convinced they are not to be looked at. Also, what's with the Frontier and Frontier Index? We already discussed that.
01:05:55
Speaker
Now in the final song, he's singing, again, I believe the stars of the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us, to save us. What are your thoughts before I drop some knowledge or some idiocy, some ignorance?
01:06:12
Speaker
I am amazed. I mean, that, that line on some level, it shouldn't work because it's, it's, it's about a millimeter away from a silly image, but it's not, it's, it's profoundly beautiful and heart wrenching. And it's, it's just, again, the mark of his mastery that he can pull that off, that he can make that image work.
01:06:40
Speaker
I read it. I think its literal meaning is pretty close to its actual meaning. Angels are coming to save us. That's the only way that he can see out of this dilemma that we've articulated is divine intervention. And I think when you think about trying to describe the stars, how the great poets and the great novelists describe the stars, it's all been done.
01:07:07
Speaker
you know, everyone from Shakespeare to Cormac McCarthy has had to describe in their own inimitable way, the stars in a night sky and it's everything has been done, you know, comparing them to holes punched in the sky or comparing them to nails or to diamonds and on and on and on and on. Stars as the headlights of angels driving to save us, nobody's ever
01:07:37
Speaker
come up with an image like that before. It's totally original. I could see Cormac thinking that and being like, nah. It's two. Yeah, he's two. I'm imagining actually the stars being described in certain moments of blood meridian, which are just frightening. I think he refers to them as electric and electrical anyway. Yeah, that's a great point.
01:08:03
Speaker
So for one, the angels, as you put it, are driving. They're driving across the infinite frontier of space in much the same way that human beings rode horses across the limited expanse of the North American Western frontier. But perhaps more importantly, we're not in the way of the light of those stars, and we're also not to take the trucker's advice not to let the stars get in your eyes, because now in the final lines of the album,
01:08:31
Speaker
The narrator, upon letting us know that the stars are in fact the headlights of angels driving from heaven to save us, to save us, tells us to do precisely what the Reverend and the trucker told us emphatically not to do.
01:08:45
Speaker
In a grand and cathartic reversal, we are told to look in the sky. They're driving from heaven into our eyes. In other words, the only way to see heaven is to look at the stars.
Thematic Reversals and Farewell
01:08:57
Speaker
I suppose it's just a hop, skip, and a jump away from saying that the only way to access heaven
01:09:02
Speaker
is to look up into the sky and directly into the headlights of the stars. So the very thing that we're told earlier in the album would cause blindness is now positioned as the only means by which to gain genuine sight. What do you think? I think that's beautifully said. Okay, fuck yeah, I'll take it.
01:09:24
Speaker
Bro, the song ends with the lines, the final words are so hard to devise. I promise I'll always remember your pretty eyes, your pretty eyes. What's your take before I finish the Exegesis? My take actually is that the narrator kills himself at the end of this song. Really?
01:09:46
Speaker
Final words are so hard to devise. I mean, let me just fill out a little bit. I'm about to die. It's so hard to figure out final words, but I know that whatever else happens, I'll always remember your pretty eyes. To me, that is a goodbye.
01:10:08
Speaker
I agree. So let me give you my take. And it's actually similar to the previous one, just the double layering at the very least. So these are quite literally the final words of the album. And I imagine it as hard as hell to devise the final words to an album. But at the same time, or at the narrative level of the album, the singer protagonist is devising, as you put it, his final words before dying.
01:10:34
Speaker
This in turn links back up perfectly with the opening line of the opening song. No, I don't really want to die. I only want to die in your eyes. So if we're assuming the narrator in track one is the same as the narrator in the final track, then he's remembering the eyes, presumably of the person being addressed and how to rent a room.
01:10:55
Speaker
I suppose, go ahead, do you want to add something? I'm impressed. That tracks to me. Okay. I suppose we are confronted in fact with three possible interpretations. I think as stated previously, there's a compelling argument to be made that the first song is about DCB's dad.
Father-Son Dynamics and Artistic Struggle
01:11:16
Speaker
That means the pretty eyes as strange as it seems could be DCB's father's eyes.
01:11:23
Speaker
DCB sings in how to rent a room, read the Metro section, read the Metro section, see my name.
01:11:31
Speaker
Well, that could be interpreted as the protagonist confessing that he didn't really want to die, but unfortunately he actually did. Consequently, DCB's father is seeing his son's memorial in the metro section of the local paper. If we choose this interpretation, DCB's dying words and the imaginings are of his father's pretty eyes.
01:11:55
Speaker
Another way of understanding this, and I prefer this interpretation because it's more hopeful, is that this is DCB's way of figuratively dying. He's figuratively dying in the sense that the relationship between father and son is dead.
01:12:11
Speaker
Understood in this way, I'll always remember your pretty eyes as the final statement before all lines of communication between father and son are severed and DCB enters into the heaven of a life without his father and his father's sins looming over him. What do you think before I keep moving?
01:12:32
Speaker
I think that interpretation is maybe equally as plausible. I'd almost be more likely to say it's both at the same time because knowing what we know about Berman and his preoccupations with existential
01:12:48
Speaker
despair and struggling to find meaning in everything and struggling with suicidal ideation. It's very hard for me to read any reference to final words as being totally divorced from a reference to literal death. But the idea that it is operating on both levels at the same time, a literal death as well as a figurative death of severing his ties with his father, that
01:13:18
Speaker
seems more likely to me than that either interpretation by itself is the correct interpretation. Okay, fair enough. So a dear friend of mine who turned me on to the sublime prose of James Agee once said that he suspected in Agee's masterpiece, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, that that book was about something other than what it purported to be about.
01:13:47
Speaker
He claimed that while on the surface it's a book about Alabama sharecroppers, it was actually in truth about the death of Agee's father. My friend suggested that Agee was essentially corkscrewing around the subject of his father's death and the attendant grief throughout the entirety of that book. Therefore, in this case, and according to my friend, what looks like a book about one thing is in fact a book about something else.
01:14:15
Speaker
You mentioned, man, Stephen King had a similar aha moment for himself after writing The Shining. You said he finally snapped to the fact that he realized that the book was actually about coming to terms or maybe coming to grips with his disastrous and destructive relationship to alcohol. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So I don't know if Berman was completely conscious of what this album was about,
01:14:43
Speaker
or if all of this granular forensic lyrical analysis makes a convincing case for the possibility of an actual, if admittedly oblique, narrative coherence. I also don't know by extension if this album was made with DCB's father consciously in mind. However, the more I think about this question, the less I feel it matters, at least for me. Because I do feel, for better or worse, convinced now of one thing, dude.
01:15:11
Speaker
I think his father actually does loom large across his entire body of work. Sometimes an omitted absence speaks much more loudly than a named presence. DCB sang the deeply moving song, I Loved Being My Mother's Son from Purple Mountains. Well, the omission in some sense is just as powerful as the inclusion, the omission being, of course, any mention of his father.
01:15:37
Speaker
Knowing what we know, DCB hated being his father's son. Therefore, the only song he could have written about his father that might have withstood the truth-saying DCB litmus test would have to be given a title like, I hated being my father's son.
01:15:55
Speaker
That would be a painful song to write for obviously different reasons. But, and I say this with the utmost respect and human to human sympathy, I think it's safe to say that I hated being my father's son was, in the final tally, a bright neon-lit constellation burning inside the night sky of this inimitable poet's beautiful and agonized soul.
01:16:19
Speaker
and his music and in many ways his entire life was passionately committed to not only not being his father but living in such a way that consciously counteracted the way his father chose to live. That's a noble fight and that was the fight that was fought in Berman's case with conviction and empathy and righteousness and rage.
01:16:43
Speaker
That fight was in a seamless sense both a secular and a spiritual one. At the secular level, that fight is the fight against tyranny and oppression and exploitation. That fight is a fight on the side of the poor, the fair, and the good.
01:16:59
Speaker
At the spiritual level, it is the fight between right and wrong, or to put it in Manichaean terms, the fight between good and evil, the fight against antisocial, anti-human self-serving behavior that cares not about the destruction that's wrought by one's actions so long as one's material conditions continue to improve. That is precisely in my mind what David Berman rejected, the frontier myth of rugged individualism.
Artistic Completion and Legacy
01:17:28
Speaker
a self-justifying mystification of what at bottom is pure and uncomplicated violence towards one's fellow human. I believe that fight is a good fight, a worthy fight, perhaps the only true fight. But true fight or not, all fights come at a price. To fight on the side of the poor, the fair, and the good provides the spiritual medicine of knowing one's fighting on the right side of history.
01:17:55
Speaker
but it can paradoxically also be the poison that also leads to one's ruin. The snake that eats its own tail also forms a shape. That shape is the shape of a circle. The natural bridge ends in such a way that not only makes the shape of a circle, it completes it. That, to my addled mind, is what great art is all about, completing the circle.
01:18:21
Speaker
whether David Berman's artistic production contained the seeds of his own destruction or not, one thing is certain, he left behind some little rooms in time. Excuse me. And I'd like to believe that every time we sing his songs, we sing him back to life. You know, there's a part of me that thinks that's a good place to stop.
01:18:47
Speaker
I don't know, what do you think? Do you think we need to append things to that? No, but I want your take on it. I am persuaded by your argument. I don't know that it's correct in every detail, but I find it a very convincing case, both in its
01:19:10
Speaker
the prominence of his father in his life and in what's going on in this record and in, I think you make a very, very good case for the circularity here and the way that the end of the final song feeds back into the beginning of the first song and the way that those two can be understood depending on where we want to put our emphasis.
01:19:35
Speaker
as an album ending on a very bleak note or a sort of endless cycle of hope and despair and despair leading back into hope again. So yeah, I think you make a very, very convincing case. I think that even if somehow someone who knows better than us were to suddenly pop up and be like, hey, you guys are like way off base here.
01:20:05
Speaker
you know, here's what David told me about this album or whatever. I think even then I would still find your take on it to be a very elegant, very persuasively argued and observed take on how this all hangs together.
01:20:28
Speaker
Thank you. I also feel back to your point about Stephen King coming to the realization for himself what The Shining really was about for him. I mean, maybe we'd never get that aha from David if there even was one, but I like that as a concrete example of we don't always know what we're driving at when we make the art we make.
01:20:56
Speaker
That's an important point, and I think that that's true even of people who are supremely in control of Berman, who thought out every detail. Nabokov comes to mind as being one of those kinds of people who, and Nabokov used to get so mad when he would read about writers talking about how they were surprised by what their characters did. Nabokov would always be like, well, my characters don't surprise me. They're my characters. I made them. They do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:21:25
Speaker
even someone like Berman or Nabokov who exercises this supreme level of control, no, they don't always understand what they're actually getting at and where this shit is actually coming from and what they're actually really, really, really trying to penetrate to the center of. Well, yeah, man, then I think that's all I needed was just a little bit of commentary from you based just to hear your take on my take.
01:21:52
Speaker
And I think we can leave it at that. Thank you everybody for sticking with us while we did this. I hope that Robert's final effort there at the end was as worth it for you as it was for us. And if we've done anything at all to increase your enjoyment of this music or to make you think about it a little different,
01:22:18
Speaker
then we're glad we could do that. And if you think we are both full of shit, then by all means, feel free to let us know that as well. We will be back before too long to talk about the third Silver Jews album, American Water.
01:22:36
Speaker
And I hope it goes without saying, but I do want to just lay out the disclaimer that any speculations that I or Brendan made over the course of this three parter dealing with the private life of David Berman.
01:22:50
Speaker
was done in the spirit of utmost respect. And if the word is maybe a little strange, because we didn't know him, but nonetheless true of love, and that we meant zero disrespect, it was only gestures of care and passion for this person and this artist. So. Good night, everybody. Thanks for listening to Candy Jail.
01:23:18
Speaker
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